


A Minor Complication

by kattahj



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Children, Drug Use, Family, Gen, Ghosts, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Parenthood, Prostitution (mentioned), Rehabilitation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:01:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24860506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattahj/pseuds/kattahj
Summary: Apocalypse averted, Klaus's life and Ben's unlife take a new turn when they find a lost ghost child who needs their help.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Dave/Klaus Hargreeves (minor), Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 152





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note #1: Thanks to keysburg/katiekeysburg for the beta and to transformers-why for talking about Five’s ghosts, and by extension making me think harder about when and where Klaus would be seeing ghosts in general.  
> Note #2: I fudged the time-travelling aspect of the season 1 finale a little, so that they only manage to go back and stop the apocalypse itself, but everything else transpired as seen on screen. I take for granted that the fic won't be remotely compliant with season 2. :-)

”Help me, somebody help me, mommy, mommy, mommy help me, mommy...”

It was the wails of someone who had been at it for a very long time and no longer believed anyone would answer, but who just couldn’t stop.

It also caused no reaction whatsoever from the people rushing past the busy intersection.

Klaus groaned. The second time around, they’d managed to stop the apocalypse with the smallest possible margin. The Academy was a pile of rubble, but his crappy pad was still standing. Time-travel included, it had been 36 hours since he last slept and several days since he last used, and his headache was getting so intense he was pretty sure he would puke if he didn’t get to lie down soon.

Craning his head, he spotted the source of the noise: a small child, in the middle of the intersection where cars passed right through it. It was wearing what seemed to be a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt, though most of the bear was stained with red, and guts spilled out through a gaping hole in the honey pot.

“Hey, kid!” he called out. “Your mom’s not coming. You’re dead. Walk towards the light, if you see one.”

This caused no reply, except more wails. Klaus took a step into the street, only to hastily jump back when a car passed at high speed. No three guesses required as to what had killed the kid.

“You there in the bloody T-shirt!” he tried. “That’s right, you. Come over here so we can talk.”

The child’s eyes widened as it noticed Klaus waving it over, and it ran through the cars up to the sidewalk.

“You can hear me!”

“That’s right.” Klaus sat down on his heels, ignoring the odd looks from various passers-by.

“No one can hear me. No one’s heard me for days. I’ve been so scared!”

The child tried to throw its arms around Klaus, but passed right through, which got it upset again.

“I want my mommy!”

Klaus looked around, just to make sure. “Your mommy’s not here. I think she’s... you know, still alive. What’s the last thing you remember before you lost her?”

“There was a truck. My stomach was hurting, really bad, and my head too. Mom kept saying that help would come. Then I sort of passed out, and only woke up when the ambulance came. Except it only took her. It didn’t take me!”

“I’m pretty sure it did take you. It’s just that you were already dead, so your soul got left behind.” He frowned. “Do you know what ‘dead’ means?”

“Of course I do! I’m not a baby!” The skinny little arms wrapped around the torn-up body. “I don’t want to be... Please, help me. Help me!”

This was the part Klaus hated. There was so fucking little he could do, and yet they never stopped asking. Normally he’d pop a pill right about now, or just plain walk away – but something about that small, desperate face was just too heart-wrenching to ignore.

So he did the next best thing, and called for backup.

“Hey, Ben, a little help here?”

“What’s going on?” Ben asked behind him.

The child screamed.

“Dead kid,” Klaus explained through the noise. “Needs some guidance.”

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

“I don’t know. Have a ghost to ghost? I don’t know the first thing about children.”

“And I do?” Ben leaned down, which only made the kid scream louder. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The screaming stopped, though there was a low keening undertone to the question that followed: “Are you a ghost?”

“Yeah, but not a bad one. My name’s Ben. What’s yours?”

The gentle tone made the child calm down a little. “Jordan.”

“Hi, Jordan. Nice to meet you. This here is Klaus. We’re brothers.”

Jordan peered up at them. “You don’t look like brothers.”

Ben smiled. “Adopted brothers. We’re going to try to help you. Now, first thing’s first. Do you see a light, a tunnel, anything you can walk towards?”

“No,” Jordan said. “Can’t I just go home?”

“Do you know where you live?”

A slight hesitation, then, “I don’t think I can find it from here.”

“Terrific,” Klaus said. He pulled Ben slightly aside and told him, “I’m about to puke, or pass out. I want to help, I really do, but I need some sleep.”

Ben nodded thoughtfully. “Jordan, do you think you could come with us to Klaus’s place for a bit? We’ll let him rest, and then we can help you out.”

Jordan looked doubtful. “I’m not supposed to go with strangers.”

Klaus gave a laugh that had a tinge of hysteria. “Kid, what’s going to happen to you that hasn’t already happened?”

Jordan glanced down at the bloodied, messy Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt, and then nodded slowly. “Okay.”

* * *

The apartment wasn’t the nicest place to bring a child, but hey, at least he _had_ a place, which hadn’t always been the case. And it wasn’t like a dead kid needed a kitchen, or shower, or any of those things he didn’t have.

Anyway, Klaus was too tired to apologize for the state of his abode. He didn’t even bother to undress, just kicked his shoes off and fell into the bed, sleep hitting him like a sledgehammer.

Weariness staved the dreams off for a while, but then the old familiar ghouls returned. He was stuck in the cold darkness of the tomb, yet he could see with perfect clarity the twisted, undead faces coming at him. Gunfire rattled in the distance, every shot bringing in even more ghosts, and then larger chunks fell down, pieces of meteorite. There were so many faces now that they filled his entire line of vision, and they all called his name.

Someone started to sing in a light voice, slightly out of tune. Just humming at first, lalala, that sort of thing. Then he could distinguish words, though he had no idea what they meant: “Áj mori séj, mori drago pikonyéj...”

Klaus opened his eyes, and looked straight into a slightly translucent, yet very graphic gut wound. He sat up straight, which caused his stomach to lurch, and then lurch again.

The singing stopped. “Are you okay?” Jordan asked.

There was absolutely zero way he could answer that without throwing up on the floor. He gave a small nod and then rushed out into the bathroom, where he lost what little he had eaten the night before.

When he returned, Jordan was sitting hunched into a little ball, covering up the wound. Ben was sitting cross-legged on the other side of the floor.

“Sorry,” Jordan said. “Didn’t mean to make you sick.”

“It wasn’t because of you,” Klaus said, and then amended, “Not just because of you.”

“You know,” Ben said thoughtfully to Jordan, “you don’t have to look the way you did when you died. People do, because that’s the last image in their heads, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. I wasn’t even in one _piece_ when I first came back.”

Images of Ben’s death appeared in Klaus’s mind, and he groaned. “Thanks. That’s exactly the reminder I needed right now.”

“Oh, grow up, I had to live it,” Ben said. “Or, well, die it.”

“How do I change?” Jordan asked.

“Close your eyes. Picture something you like to wear. Something you like a whole lot, and know exactly what it looks like. Imagine it around your body. The texture, the colors...”

The ghostly appearance started to shift, and form again around a gaudy Christmas sweater with lots of brown animals running around on a red background. But proper red this time, not blood red.

“That’s really good.” Ben smiled. “It would take some people years to achieve something so detailed. You’re talented!”

Jordan smiled in relief. “Will you help me find my way home?”

Ben and Klaus exchanged glances. It’d be an odd kind of home to return to, for a dead kid, but what else could they do?

“Diego,” Klaus said. “He might have more cop friends than the one who died. Maybe he can figure something out.”

He leaned down to put on his shoes, and had to steady himself against the wall as his head started spinning.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Jordan asked anxiously. “Because you look kind of sick, and you sounded so scared when you slept.”

How did you explain withdrawal to a child? Not to mention the rest of it.

Klaus settled for, “I’ve been sick, but I’m getting better. Your singing really helped, by the way. Thank you.”

That earned him a smile. “Mom always sings that to me when I’m afraid of the dark. Sang.” Jordan’s lip wobbled at the last word.

“I’m sure we can get her to sing it again, once we find her,” Klaus said, and hoped it was the truth.

* * *

Diego’s place was almost as bad a dump as Klaus’, which was saying something. The man himself wasn’t home, but the gym opened early, and after some convincing, the instructor let Klaus in.

The actual boxing ring currently held three people – two of them sparring, and the third being a dead guy with a head so swollen it was fair to assume a bit of brain scrambling had been the cause of death. Klaus quickly ducked out of sight, and proceeded down to Diego’s room, which at least was blissfully empty.

There was an old and crappy television which did work after a fashion, as long as you pointed the antenna the right way. And even in the early morning, there were always some cartoons to be found. Klaus set the channel to an episode of DuckTales and went off in search of food.

The cupboards were almost empty, but behind the pasta and the salt Klaus did find a half-full bag of popcorn. It wasn’t exactly breakfast food, but it would do.

When he brought the bag back to the table, Ben only gave him a tired look, but Jordan reached out automatically to take some popcorn, only to be utterly dismayed when the hand passed right through the bag.

Real thoughtful, Klaus berated himself, and tried to find a positive spin. “You know what? I bet we can kill those popcorns. Send them over to your side, yeah?”

He poured out a generous heaping of popcorn on the table and took off his shoe in order to have something to smash them with.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ben said as Klaus started smashing. “Even if it were possible to kill popcorn, they would have died when they were popped. What, you think they survive being _cooked in oil_ and then only die when you crush them?”

“Shh,” Klaus said, because Jordan was smiling and that was the most important thing.

The door opened, and Diego stepped in, coffee cup in one hand and bakery bag in the other. He took in the sight of Klaus with the shoe and the popcorn crumbs, and nodded. “Okay.”

“Ooh,” Klaus moaned when the scent from the bag hit his nose. “Are those bagels? Can I have one? Please?”

“It’s like having a dog,” Diego muttered, but he sat down next to them and handed a bagel over to Klaus, who took a bite with half-closed eyes, savoring the taste.

Jordan had curled up to the side of the bed and was whispering to Ben: “Who is that?”

“Our brother, Diego.”

“How many brothers do you have?”

“Four. And two sisters.”

“That’s a _big_ family.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“He’s kind of scary.”

“Nah, he’s not so bad, once you get to know him. Big old softie, deep down.”

Klaus snorted at that, wishing Diego could have heard it, just to see him blow his top. But of course Diego was oblivious, having breakfast in silence.

Once Diego had drained the last of his coffee, he said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What are you doing here? Don’t you have a TV of your own to watch?”

“Actually, no,” Klaus replied. “I hocked it a while ago.”

“Of course you did. You got so cartoon-deprived you had to come here and watch some, is that it?”

“Actually, I was wondering if you still have an in with the police, after Patch.”

Diego’s face went glum. “Not really.”

“Phone book?” Klaus ventured.

With a sigh, Diego got up and fetched the white pages, which he tossed none too gently at Klaus.

“What’s your last name, kid?”

“What?” Diego asked, but Jordan leaned closer, eager.

“Demeter.”

“Can you spell it?” But that only got him a blank look, so clearly not. “Okay, it’s unusual, at least. What are your parents called?”

“Joe and Rosie. But dad doesn’t live with us anymore.”

“Got it.”

“Who are you talking to?” Diego asked.

“Diego, Jordan, Jordan, Diego,” Klaus said, gesturing vaguely as he leafed through the pages for various Demeters, Dimiters, Dimitris and Demetros. “Jordan was in a car crash and didn’t survive, but mommy did, so now we’re trying to find out where mommy lives and bring Jordan home.”

“And how old is Jordan?”

“...Five?” Klaus ventured.

“Seven!” said Jordan, affronted.

“Sorry, seven.”

“Shit.” Diego looked stunned. “That’s awful. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You could drive us,” Klaus suggested. “There are only a handful of people called Rose Demeter or anything similar in town. Shouldn’t take too long.”

He did his best pleading look, which Diego waved off.

“You don’t have to beg. Of course I’ll drive. Got to get you home, kid.” He stood up, then frowned. “Hey, is Jordan a boy or a girl?”

Klaus hadn’t even thought to wonder before, and looking at Jordan now, found it even harder to answer than the question about age. “I don’t know. Which are you?”

Jordan glared at him. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“Ugh!”

“Don’t be like that, how should I know?” He turned to Ben. “What do you think, is it a boy or a girl?”

“I think calling a person ‘it’ is rude.”

“Good point. ‘They’. Until further notice, Jordan is a ‘they’.”

Diego sighed. “What does... they... look like?”

“Uh, black hair, kind of too long to properly be called short, brown eyes, blue jeans, Christmas sweater with elk.”

“Well, that tells me nothing.”

“Reindeers,” Ben said. “Not elk.”

“Fine, reindeers,” Klaus amended.

“Who would have _elk_ on a Christmas sweater anyway?”

Jordan giggled. “Rudolf the red-nosed elk!”

Klaus pointed a finger at them. “You know what? You two ganging up on me is _not_ okay.”

Diego’s eyes flicked in the general direction of the ghosts, and his face softened. “Is Ben here too?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“He always did sass you. Hi, bro.” His voice had that gentle tone it hardly ever did. “I’ve missed you. A lot.”

“I’ve missed you too,” Ben said, and Klaus repeated the message to Diego.

Jordan looked from one to another, and that little face scrunched up in misery. “Can we go home now?”

“Yeah,” Ben promised. “We’re going home.”

* * *

Of course some of the Rosie Demeters lived pretty far apart, so it wasn’t what you’d call a direct trip. After the first couple of red herrings, Jordan came up with a new trick: to jump straight up from the passenger seat, through the roof, and land in the backseat. It was a bit unsettling to watch, but also pretty neat. If Klaus had been a dead kid, he might have been tempted to do something similar. You’d think a kid who had just died in a car crash would be more fearful – but then, maybe bouncing about in cars had something to do with the whole dying in a car crash situation.

“Hey,” said Jordan after the third jump. “How come I go through the ceiling, but not the seat or the floor?”

“Habit,” Ben said. “You’re used to car seats being there to sit on, so your mind adapts accordingly and doesn’t... no, don’t!” Because Jordan had gone through the floor and disappeared.

Ben reached out an arm, and when that didn’t help, vanished through the trunk.

“You’d better stop the car,” Klaus said, and Diego obediently slowed to a halt by the side of the road.

“What’s going on?”

Ben reappeared, pushing a laughing Jordan in front of him.

“That was reckless,” he chided, which only made the kid laugh harder.

“Okay, all accounted for,” Klaus told Diego. “Sorry about that. And Ben, don’t be so hard on them. At least this is better than the misery before.”

“Do I even have to go in a car?”Jordan asked. “Or can I float somewhere? What do ghosts usually do?”

“After a while, you learn to just manifest in places,” Ben said.

“What’s manifest?”

“Show up out of nowhere. It’s a bit like the way you changed your shirt. You concentrate on a place really hard and show up there. Don’t do that now!” he hastened to add. “If you think of home and go there, we won’t be able to follow.”

But Jordan’s mind had gone down a different track. “Can you _really_ not tell if I’m a boy or a girl?”

“We really can’t,” Klaus said. “Care to inform us?”

“Cool!” Jordan glanced at Ben, face scrunched up in concentration. The shaggy hair blurred and shifted into Ben’s gelled back style, and then, with some more concentrating, into locks that flowed down to the waist. By now, Jordan was laughing so hard they almost fell through the floor again, and the hair reverted back into its original cut.

“So you’re not telling us, huh?” Klaus asked.

“No way! This is too awesome!”

Ben started laughing too. “What’s the matter, Klaus? Nonbinary ghost child should be right up your alley.”

That laughter was contagious, and Klaus gave in. “You know what? You’re right. Nonbinary ghost child _is_ right up my alley. Good for you, kid!”

Jordan started to reply, but then grew suddenly serious. “We’re getting close. It’s to the right by the church.”

The neighborhood was nicer than the one Klaus lived in, if not by much. The kind of place where people paid their bills in full and then counted the pennies to the next paycheck.

The apartment building had a code lock.

“Any word on the combination?” Diego asked.

Jordan looked confused, but then brightened: “X marks the spot!”

So Klaus punched in 1-9-3-7 and was rewarded with a green light.

“What are we supposed to tell her?” Diego asked as they stepped inside.

Klaus watched Jordan, who was now bouncing up the stairs, and shrugged. Regardless of what you said, conveying messages from ghosts to mourning relatives was always a hit-or-miss endeavor. It was one of the reasons he had given up trying.

R. Demeter lived on the third floor. The woman who answered the door had red-rimmed, puffy eyes in a bare face, her dark hair was in a messy ponytail, and she was wearing sweatpants. The mourning mother vibe was clear even before Jordan mumbled, “Oh, mommy, don’t be sad!”

“Mrs. Demeter?” Klaus asked. “We’re here to talk about Jordan.”

The woman’s eyes filled up with new tears. “Jordan’s dead.”

“I know. That’s why we’re here. We have a message from Jordan, to you. No, don’t close the door!” Strictly speaking, they’d done their job, Jordan was back home, but they couldn’t very well just drop the kid by mommy’s front step without making any kind of contact between the two. Klaus put a foot in the doorway and started speaking faster. “My name is Klaus Hargreeves, I was with the Umbrella Academy. Do you remember the Umbrella Academy? Domino masks, school uniforms? I was the one who talked to ghosts. These are my brothers... uh... my brother, Diego. Jordan came to us yesterday.”

Mrs. Demeter hesitated, still holding the door handle, but not yet slamming the door shut around Klaus’s foot. He tried to grab hold of Jordan, bring them into reality, but of course that particular new part of his power chose to poop out on him. And so instead he searched for something convincing to say.

“Hey, Jordan,” he asked, “what’s the name of that song? The one you sang to me?”

“Mori shej Szabina,” said Jordan, who was trying to hold their mother’s hand and having just as little luck.

“Morrisey Sabina,” he said desperately. “You know, lalalala, that one?”

Jordan sang the chorus, and Klaus hummed along as well as he could.

Mrs. Demeter drew a shaky breath. “My baby? You’ve talked to my baby?”

“Yeah,” Klaus said, shoulders falling back down. “Yeah, right now, actually. Can we come in?”

* * *

Even without counting the ghosts, the apartment was crowded. It only had one small bedroom and a combined kitchen and living room, and there was a toddler and a somewhat bigger child playing on the floor. Klaus wondered if either one of them was old enough to understand that their sibling was dead. Maybe it was easier that way – but then again, someone you loved suddenly disappearing with no proper explanation was an ordeal of a different kind.

His sight dimmed with tears, and he rubbed the back of his hands against his eyes.

Mrs. Demeter sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs and gestured at them to take the others.

“So you’re telling me that Jordan is here? Right now?”

“Yes. I know it’s a lot to take in, but after the car crash, Jordan’s soul was stuck at the intersection, trying to find the way back home.”

“I passed out,” Mrs. Demeter sobbed. “In the ambulance. It wasn’t until I woke up in the hospital that they told me Jordan was dead. My poor baby! Oh, God, why couldn’t it have been me? It should have been me!”

“No!” protested Jordan.

“No,” Klaus echoed, fighting the image of Dave’s face that always lurked at the back of his mind these days. This wasn’t about him. “Don’t think like that. You’ve got two other kids who need you as well. And Jordan’s fine... well, you know, not fine, but home. And beloved, and cared for, which counts for a lot, believe me.”

Diego cleared his throat. “Mrs. Demeter, this may be a strange question, but is Jordan a b...” He fell silent at the warning glance that Klaus threw in his direction, and shrugged. “Never mind.”

Mrs. Demeter wasn’t listening anyway. She’d started talking in a language that Klaus couldn’t even name, much less understand, long, heartfelt sentences, and Jordan replied in kind.

“Uh, Jordan?” Klaus said. “I need to tell your mother what you’re saying, and right now I don’t _know_ what you’re saying, so...”

Jordan halted. “Right. Tell her I love her, and I’m glad to be home, and I’m sorry I died like that.”

“Jesus, Jordan, that wasn’t your fault!”

“Just tell her! And that I’m okay now. That’s all, I guess.”

So Klaus told Mrs. Demeter that, and then told her some more things, and had a cup of sweet tea, and then, well, it was time to go, wasn’t it?

“You take care, kid,” he said, crouching down. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” said Jordan and tried to shake hands, though that didn’t work.

Ben leaned down and let his spectral hand brush against Jordan’s. “Goodbye, Jordan. You’re going to be a brilliant ghost. It’s not that bad an afterlife, really.”

Diego, who hadn’t even properly met Jordan, was tearing up anyway. He didn’t say anything until the brothers had left the apartment and were on their way back down to the car.

“Well, that’s... done,” he said. “Let’s... get out of here.”

And those halting phrases proved more than anything how affected he’d been by the whole thing.

Klaus was finding it hard to speak too. Which was ridiculous, he told himself. He needed to recuperate from the averted apocalypse, and withdrawal, and oh yes, the loss of the only long-term boyfriend he’d ever had. The last thing he needed was some ghost child to worry about.

Considering the circumstances, this was the happiest possible ending.

This was _fine_.


	2. Chapter 2

The apartment had never felt more like a dump than it did when Klaus returned. The bare walls seemed grayer than usual, the water colder, and when he escaped outside to go for a walk, it started to rain.

No matter what he tried to do, the same damned jungle appeared before his eyes, or the Academy in rubble, or the whole damned _world_ falling to pieces, and okay, they’d stopped that one from happening, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see it.

How the hell was he supposed to stay sober in this shit?

In the end, he went to bed early, not that it helped much. The dreams were worse than usual, and when he woke up in the morning, he just stared up at the ceiling, trying to will the nausea and shivers away.

“Dave?” he called out. “Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Please, Dave, let me know if you can hear me! I know it’s been a long time for you, but I’ve only just lost you, and I really need you right now. It’s been a shit-ass... well, life, and you made it so much better. Even with the war and everything else.”

Still nothing. Tears started spilling down Klaus’s cheeks onto the pillow.

“Please... please...”

But this was no way of doing things, was it? He had to get his mojo properly working. Wiping the tears away, he sat up cross-legged and put his arms in meditative position. There weren’t any candles, but he’d only ever used those for ambiance anyway.

Over the next couple of hours, he threw every trick in his repertoire onto the indifferent void of eternity. All it accomplished was deepening the ache in both his body and soul.

In the end, he went “fuck it,” and put on some clothes. With any luck, Seth still held the empty lot beside the gas station.

Ben was waiting by the door, arms crossed. “Where are you going?”

“I can’t just lie around moping all day,” Klaus said, grabbing his jacket.

“Good. You shouldn’t. So what are you going to do instead?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Meaning drugs.” Ben stepped into the doorway, though that didn’t halt Klaus’s procession through it. “Don’t.”

“Thank you, Nancy Reagan, I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Come on, you don’t have to do this. Just call your sponsor or something...”

“My sponsor? That’s a laugh.” Klaus hurried down the stairs now, with Ben close behind. “Remember the last one? I told him the truth, and he kept asking me to call up his dad for him, chew him out for everything he’d done wrong. Which, my sympathies and all, but I’ve got enough of my own daddy issues. Old man was an ugly corpse, too.”

“So maybe not that, but there are still other ways to deal. I know you feel like shit right now, but...”

“What do you know?” Klaus spun around, ready to throw a punch even without any guarantee that it would hit. “What do you know of _any_ of it? You’re free from it all. I take a step outside, I bet you that within ten minutes I hit a place where someone died, and the whole circus starts again. I’m sick, I’m broke, and the only ways I know to make money will land me back in jail. The only man I’ve ever truly loved is dead, and won’t even answer my call. The apocalypse has been averted, I’m no use to anyone anymore, so give me one good reason to stay sober!”

“What if he comes back? What if you’re just not trying hard enough?”

“Believe me, he’s not coming. He’s probably long off to the Pearly Gates with that little asshole on her bicycle.”

“What bicycle?”

“Never fucking mind.” Klaus turned away again, and headed out on the street.

“I don’t want you to die!” Ben shouted. “That’s the only reason I’ve got. I may not know what it’s like for you, but I do know what death’s like, and I want better for you. You said it yourself, you stopped the apocalypse. Are you telling me, after all that, you’re not strong enough to ride this out?”

“I kind of had some help with the apocalypse, remember?”

“So have some help now. The others would help if you asked them. The Umbrella Academy dealt with the end of the world. We ought to be able to handle the world still standing.”

Ben had hurried his steps so he was once again in front of Klaus, and this time, when he raised his hand to Klaus’s chest, it made contact.

Klaus stopped. “What do you want me to do? Go crawling back to Diego’s begging him for food again?”

“If that’s what it takes, then yes.”

“Fuck you and your pep talks,” Klaus said, and changed direction.

Ben gave a wide, relieved smile. “Good. I’m coming with you.”

* * *

The boxing instructor seemed none too thrilled to see Klaus again, but let him in.

“Hargreeves is doing the locker rooms,” he said. “Tell him he works every day, not at his convenience!”

Klaus pretended not to hear. At least the ghost boxer was nowhere in sight, and living people were a whole lot easier to ignore than dead ones.

Diego was indeed cleaning up a locker room, and gave a heavy sigh upon seeing Klaus.

“What is it now?” he asked, though there was no vitriol to the question. “Dead child again?”

“Nah. Just... trying not to use. Ben said to ask for help.”

Concern rose in Diego’s eyes. “Shit. Yeah. What do you need?”

“I don’t even know. Company? Someone to talk to? Or someone to punch me in the face if I try to go off looking for a dealer.”

“Sure, I can do that.” Diego started putting the mop back on the cart, but hesitated. “Could we do it here? Or do you need... If you want to go down to my room, or leave, that’s fine too.”

“Your boss man didn’t seem too happy with you skipping work.”

“He’s not. But, you know. This is more important.”

Klaus swallowed hard. Over by the door, Ben smiled and raised his eyebrows. He’d been right, as usual.

“Here’s fine,” Klaus said, sitting down on the wooden bench.

Ben sat down next to him. “Told you.”

“Shut up.”

“What?” Diego asked, rinsing out his mop.

“Not you.”

“Hey, if you want, you could help out. It’d be quicker, and give you something to do while you wait.”

“Do I get paid?” Klaus said, standing back up again.

“You get food.”

“Hm. Okay. What do I do?”

“Change the trash bags?”

So for the next few hours, Klaus helped take out the trash, clean the sinks and all the rest alongside Diego. It was slow-moving, in his current condition, but by far not the worst thing he’d done for a meal. In a way, it was almost meditative, getting each surface clean again. Possibly he’d feel differently if he had to do it day in and day out, the way Diego did.

They did talk some, though when push came to shove, Klaus found that he wasn’t that eager to go confessional. It mostly became his customary cracks and anecdotes, with perhaps a little truth slipping in here and there. He also translated a fair bit of Ben’s comments to Diego, and wasn’t that a strange sensation? Three brothers together, without any type of quarrel, just talking and getting the work done.

When they had finished with the locker rooms and were headed downstairs, Klaus put a hand on Diego’s arm.

“Hey, thanks. This helps.”

“I’m not doing much,” Diego said with a shrug.

“You’re doing enough.”

Diego bit his lip and seemed to weigh his words before asking, “Hey, uh, you haven’t seen Patch around, have you?”

“Your cop lady? No. I’m sorry.” Normally he’d make some scathing remark to be rid of the implied request, but damn it, Diego had earned the favor. “I could try to conjure her, if you want?”

After a beat, Diego shook his head. “Nah. If she’s at peace, let her rest. Better that way. And probably more restful for you too, right?”

“I do have enough ghosts on my hands,” Klaus admitted, throwing a glance at Ben, who smirked at him.

“You know you love me, really.”

He should have made some cocky remark in return – but right then, he couldn’t manage even the standard denial.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said instead, returning the smile.

* * *

Klaus was sore and tired by the time he returned home in the afternoon, but he still felt a bit better than he had before. Enough to believe that he might be able to get through the day without drugs. The few ghosts he encountered on the way weren’t persistent enough to prove a problem.

On his way up the staircase, however, he heard the echo of a voice that could only be spectral in nature.

“I won’t be any problem. Please let me stay. I promise I won’t be any problem.”

It was a child’s voice, and a familiar one. Klaus looked at Ben in alarm. “Jordan?”

“But why?” asked Ben, equally worried.

Klaus hurried his steps, but of course the whole business with keys and doors meant that Ben was still the first one through. Once Klaus stepped inside, he saw his brother crouching down before the whimpering child, who was repeating the same plea:

“Please let me stay. I promise I won’t be any problem!”

“You wouldn’t be any problem,” Ben said, eyes searching out Klaus as if _he_ held any answers to this dilemma.

“Hey, kid,” Klaus said, getting down to floor level as well. “What happened? Didn’t things work out with your mom?”

“She doesn’t hear me,” Jordan lamented. “She talks to me, but if I say something back, she doesn’t answer, and if I go to play with Milan and Emma she just keeps talking, like I’m still there. And they don’t hear me either, or see me, and I can’t touch any toys, not even my bear that I’ve had since I was a baby, or my Superman, or _anything_ , and I just want mommy to hold me and tell me it’ll be okay, but I can’t even have that.” Looking up at Klaus, they pleaded, “Will you do it?”

“Well, the holding part is a crapshoot,” Klaus said helplessly, “but...”

He reached out, putting every effort he could manage into getting his powers to cooperate. At first there was nothing, then an electric tingle that turned into something almost solid, as his arms closed around the little phantom body.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered.

Another tingle ran up his arms. Ben had joined the hug from the other side, his spectral form solidifying a bit as well.

“It’s going to be okay,” he echoed. “We’ll take care of you.”

Jordan nodded in-between them, calmer now. “I just need someone to talk to.”

“Of course you do,” Ben said with a sad smile. “How did you even find us again?”

“I did what you said, I thought of the place and manifested. It took _hours_ to get it right, and then when I did, you weren’t even home!”

“Well, we’re here now,” said Klaus. He tried to think of something to cheer Jordan up, something nice and child-friendly that was still available when you were a ghost, and both toys and food were beyond reach. “Hey, what do you say we go down to the park? Watch some ducks?”

Jordan thought about it, then nodded slowly. “Okay.”

* * *

The park had been a good idea, Klaus concluded as he stood by the banister of the duck pond, watching the two ghosts play as he tried to get some energy back. All he’d been thinking was that they could hang around and see the ducks swim, the way you did when you were so high the slightest bit of movement became fascinating. But Ben had taken it one step further, and led Jordan out onto the pond, where they started running around in a game of tag as if what lay beneath their feet was ice instead of plain water.

The ducks and other birds seemed a little bit unsettled by the unseen presence, but not enough to do more than move a few inches whenever one of the two got too close. Perhaps they were used to such intrusions – they weren’t the only ghosts in the park. On the other side of the pond, an old man sat on a bench, throwing his hand out repeatedly as if to feed the birds, although no crumbs fell to the ground. And a little distance off, a homeless guy was wandering the paths, muttering to himself. Neither one of them paid Klaus any attention, and he definitely wasn’t about to chat them up.

Jordan was in a better mood, at least for the time being, even though the weight of their loss would most certainly strike again soon. That childish see-saw of emotion was perhaps a blessing, that nothing could quite wipe out the joy of... well, now Jordan was going down under the surface to see the pond from below. Like something Diego might have done, when they were kids. Klaus smiled a little.

Ben had remained on top of the pond, and walked back to Klaus, still with half an eye at the place where Jordan had gone under.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking, what next?”

“What do you mean?”

“Duck ponds aren’t going to do the trick forever. There’s this huge, monumental loss, this grief that I don’t think Jordan even fully understands yet. And I’m not equipped to deal with that. I can barely deal with my own. Not to mention everything else a child needs, like school.”

“You’d send a ghost to school?”

“Learning, in any case. We can’t just place them in front of Diego’s TV and call it a day. What the hell are we even doing? I’m a junkie with a rap sheet, and you’re dead!”

“So’s Jordan,” Ben said with a frown, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“Neither one of us knows about children, is my point. How are we going to run this, work from our own upbringing? Kid would be traumatized for life! Unlife.”

Ben looked out over the pond, where Jordan was resurfacing, dry as ever, with glittering eyes.

“Well, we’re not giving up,” he said.

“I’m not saying we should. Just... what next?”

They stood in silence for a while. Then Ben suggested: “Allison.”

“What?”

“She has a daughter, she must be able to give us at least a few pointers.”

“She won’t even be able to see Jordan.”

“So you do the talking, I handle the ghost stuff, and Allison tells us the child-rearing bits.”

Jordan was heading back now, and caught the last end of the sentence. “What are you talking about?”

“Uh, would you like to meet our sister?” Klaus asked.

“Sure. Does she live around here?”

“Where _is_ she staying now?” Klaus asked Ben.

“The Plaza.”

“Oh la la, snazzy as always. No,” he told Jordan. “We’re going to have to take a bus.”

Jordan nodded. “Can we go to the playground first? I think I can still do slides.”

“Absolutely.”

They followed along as Jordan zoomed down towards the playground – only to slow down to a halt at the sight of a family playing by the swings.

It was a young woman with two children. One was a little girl, being pushed by her mother in the baby swing. The other was an older boy, who swung himself back and forth on one of the tire swings.

Jordan stood in the sandbox, arms hanging down, face lost and empty.

“You okay?” Klaus asked gently. “Do you want to go home?”

He wasn’t even sure himself whether he meant home to the apartment, or home to Jordan’s mom, with all that would entail. But Jordan shook their head.

“Let’s go take that bus,” they said quietly.


	3. Chapter 3

There were enough ghosts in the Plaza lobby to make Klaus seriously consider walking right back out of there. Most of them were old, with no visible wounds, and judging by their spectral clothes, filthy rich by the time of death. No surprises there. A few were younger, one of which was gruesome enough to make Klaus gesture in quite the opposite direction, to steer away Jordan’s gaze.

“Now, this is what I call a fancy hotel. See that chandelier? One just like it in the next room. And probably in every room, what do I know? I was raised in a mansion, but even I’m impressed. Those floors? Just want to roll them up, take them home and make love all over them.”

Ben coughed. “Inappropriate.”

But of course it was too much to hope that Jordan would pay more attention to the luxuries than the corpses.

“Who are all those people?”

Klaus sighed. “Hotels have a lot of people staying there for short periods of time. Not all of them are in good health. Sometimes they die. And a few end up as ghosts.”

“Why is that man’s neck blue? Did someone kill him?”

There was a touch of panic in Jordan’s voice, which also unfortunately made it rise in volume. The aforementioned man stood up, fixing the three of them with a desperate glare.

Klaus, who was well familiar with that kind of expression, not to mention the sight of rope burns, took a step back. “Uh, probably not?”

“It was supposed to _end_!” the man roared, advancing towards them. “I meant for it to end! Make it end _now_!”

“I can’t do that!” Klaus protested. “I’m not good enough at this shit!”

And fuck on toast, now the whole lot of them had discovered him and were crowding in to make their demands.

“Young man, you have to call up Congress for me, this country needs me!”

“I never got to say goodbye to my daughter!”

“Could you tell me where to find my husband, he seems to have gone without me?”

“This is not a suitable afterlife, how do I go about changing it?”

On and on, ranging from heartfelt woes to overblown entitlement, but too many, far too many, and the hanged man still roaring over them all. They were only a bunch of rich blowhards, but the sheer number of them brought up shadows of even more ghosts in Klaus’ mind, and despite the size of the lobby he felt the cold walls of the mausoleum closing in around him.

He clutched his head, rocking against the onslaught. “Go away, please go away...”

Jordan screamed.

It wasn’t the wails from before, not even a scream of terror. It was the drawn-out, irritating scream of an absolutely furious little child.

“Leave him _alone_!” Jordan screamed. “You’re hurting him, leave him alone! He’s here with _us_ , not you!”

Like an animal, Jordan swiped out against the crowd, and for a brief moment, long claws appeared at the end of their fingers, flickered, then died away.

The ghosts stood in stunned silence for a second. It was not nearly enough to frighten them off – but Ben clicked his tongue.

“Good thinking,” he said.

A long, blueish tentacle shot out of his chest, grabbed the hanged man by his bruised throat, and tossed him through the outer wall.

The rest of the ghosts shrieked and shattered in all directions, leaving the lobby empty.

“Awesome,” Jordan breathed. “You’ve got to teach me to do that! I couldn’t even manage the claws right.”

Ben swallowed. “It’s, uh... a bit beyond your skill set right now.”

“Thank you,” Klaus said quietly.

Their eyes met, in shared understanding of the suckier sides of their powers.

“Don’t ask me to do it every time you don’t feel like talking to someone,” Ben said. “But this... this was too much.”

“Yeah,” Klaus agreed with a weak chuckle. “It was.”

“Sir?”

Klaus jumped at the cold, clipped voice, and spun around, facing a stone-faced and very much alive desk clerk.

“How may I help you?” the man asked in a tone which implied that the preferred help was out the door.

“Oh,” Klaus said, relieved to only have this living asshole to deal with. “Allison Hargreeves’ room, please.”

“I’m afraid I can’t provide that information.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, crazy fans and paparazzi and all that. But I’m her brother. Klaus Hargreeves.” Responding to the icy disbelief on the clerk’s face, he continued: “Honest, I am. Remember the Umbrella Academy? I was number four, the Séance. You could call her up to... uh, no, that won’t work, will it? Just give me the room number.”

“Sir, that won’t be possible.”

“Oh, come on, a room number? Or should I take a guess? It’s going to be expensive as fuck – sorry, Jordan – but of course they’re all expensive, aren’t they? Does she have a suite? I wouldn’t put it past her to get one. I’ll just go have a look, shall I?”

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

That veneer of politeness over solid steel couldn’t be reasoned with. Klaus acquiesced and let himself be ushered out the door – but a guest coming inside caught the clerk’s attention, which left enough time for Klaus to usher himself back in again, and into an elevator.

“Right,” he said after the elevator doors closed. “You two search the rooms, I knock when you find the right one. Jordan, do you know what Allison Hargreeves looks like?”

Jordan shook their head. Not a movie buff, then.

“Medium height, black but fairly light, broad mouth, heart-shaped face, long curly hair that’s bleached halfway. Movie star beautiful. If you think you’ve seen her, just call in Ben, he can confirm.”

“Is everyone in your family a different color?” Jordan asked, brow furrowed.

Ben laughed. “I wish. The whites still outnumber us.”

“Never bothered you before,” Klaus said.

“That’s what you think.” But Ben was still grinning as he stepped out of the elevator and started sticking his head into the different rooms.

Jordan followed suit on the other side of the corridor, and Klaus waited for them to return.

When they did, Jordan’s eyes were wide with wonder.

“These rooms are so nice!” they said. “Is your sister super rich?”

“She kind of is, yeah,” said Klaus.

“Then why doesn’t she give you any money? Your apartment sucks.”

“Because he’d spend it all on booze and drugs,” said Ben drily.

Jordan laughed, then fell quiet. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Yeah. Kidding. Really funny, my brother,” Klaus said. “Nothing on this floor? Okay, let’s try the next.”

The third floor gave no results either, except Jordan informing him that, “One man was picking his nose, and one lady was holding up her deodorant to the mirror and thanking a bunch of people for giving it to her. Are adults just like kids when no one is watching?”

“In some ways,” Klaus agreed.

The next two floors were fairly uneventful, and then they reached the corridor where, in the middle of the room search, Jordan gave off a loud shriek, followed by laughter and the exclamation, “Ew! Ew! Ew!”

Still laughing, Jordan came running back, followed by Ben, who rolled his eyes.

“Guess what I saw?” Jordan exclaimed, bouncing up and down, their face in a grimace of combined disgust and excitement. “There was a man and a lady, and they were both naked, and he was sitting on top of her, and he was sticking his _thing_ into her, I can’t believe it, that’s so gross! And she was all ‘oh, oh, oh!’ and he was groaning like ‘uuuurgh’, and why would they _do_ that!? Ew!”

“Your mom never told you about the birds and the bees, huh?” Klaus asked.

“Huh? What do the birds and the bees have to do with anything? It was so funny, because his belly was jumping up and down like this, and...”

“Okay, enough,” Ben said. “You don’t have to spill all their little secrets. In fact, you don’t have to pay any attention to what the guests are doing, at all. Just see if any of the women could be Allison, and if not, you go into the next room.”

“That’s not half as much fun,” whined Jordan, but they obeyed.

* * *

In the end, Ben was the one who found the right room. By then, Klaus had started to wonder if Allison had gone out for the night, or if they were even in the right hotel at all. He sat with the back to the wall, watching the two ghosts go through yet another corridor, when Ben stuck his head out and gave a sharp whistle.

“Hey, over here!”

Jordan returned too and went straight through the door. As Klaus knocked, he could hear them inside saying, “Oh, wow!”

It took only a moment for Allison to open. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been covered in dust and specks of blood. Now she was all cleaned up, wearing a cream silk dressing gown, and with her hair hanging loose. Tired-looking and barefaced, sure, but the difference was still remarkable.

Jordan was entranced, circling Allison to get a look from all angles. “She looks like an angel! Or a princess. An angel princess. Are you sure she’s your sister?”

“Yeah,” Klaus said. “Hiya, sis.”

Alison frowned slightly, but let him in. It wasn’t one of the fanciest suites, which he half would have expected, but a spacious room with two beds, a sitting area, and a dresser that probably – but not definitely – wasn’t as antique as the design suggested.

From the nearest bedside table, she took a pad of paper and wrote: “Are you OK? Something wrong?”

“Not exactly. We could use your advice, that’s all. Thing is, the other day Ben and I met a little ghost, tiny seven-year-old ghost...”

“I’m not _that_ little!” Jordan protested.

“...called Jordan. Who is here now, as a matter of fact. And we figured, when it comes to children, you’re the expert, so... we bow at your feet, great guru, pretty much.”

Alison sat down heavily on the bed, and wrote, “Ghost child in here now?”

“Yup. Very much so.”

Jordan was checking out Allison’s luggage with utmost interest, which made Ben mutter: “Don’t go through her stuff.”

“It’s not like I can touch anything,” Jordan said with a grimace.

“Still.”

With some effort, Klaus returned his attention to Allison, who was writing again:

“What can I do?”

“We just need you to give us a few pointers, what to do with a kid. I mean, I know they’re a dead kid, and that’s different. No need to worry about proper bedtimes or healthy meals, or all that boring crap. But some things have to be the same, right?”

“Why can’t she talk?” Jordan asked.

“She, uh... had an accident.”

Allison wrote: “What kind of accident?”

“No, I meant you, not Jordan. Well, Jordan had an accident too, a car crash, but Jordan isn’t a she, they’re... well, they refuse to tell, so we’re sticking with ‘they’ for the time being.”

“I like ‘they’,” Jordan said dreamily. “It makes me feel powerful, like I’m a whole bunch of people at once.”

“Like one Jordan isn’t plenty,” Ben teased.

Allison frowned. Her gaze went from Klaus, to the place where Jordan was standing, and then back. She wrote: “Long term?”

Klaus bit his lip and raised an eyebrow at Ben, who shrugged. Jordan, having read the note as well, got an anxious expression.

“Well, yeah,” Klaus said. “I mean, it’s one day at a time, like everything else. But they can stay as long as they like.”

Jordan beamed, while Allison looked a lot less thrilled. She clicked her tongue and shook her head slowly, and Klaus didn’t need any words to hear her reproach, the reminder of every screw-up in his screwed-up life: the ODs, the stuff he’d pilfered from the Academy, the times he’d had to go down on his knees to afford a fix... of course, Allison didn’t know about that last part. He hoped.

“Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admitted. “That’s why we’re here. Between you and me and Ben, we should be able to figure something out.”

“Ben here too?”

“With them all the way,” said Ben, and Klaus conveyed the message.

Allison sighed, and after writing for a while, it was with some hesitation that she showed the pad: “I’m only staying a week. Maybe less.”

“What!? But you can’t!”

A stupid thing to say, because Allison had a whole glamorous life back in L.A., and she had always meant to head back there once things were sorted out with the funeral. All that just faded away compared to fighting the apocalypse. Even though it had been less than two weeks since they all met up again, and they hadn’t seen each other in over a decade before then, it felt _wrong_ to just go their separate ways. They were just learning how to become a family again. An academy.

And wouldn’t Dad just be laughing his stick-infested ass off in his barber shed afterlife, if he knew that?

“My kid,” Alison wrote.

Klaus deflated. “Shit. Yes. Of course.”

“She has a kid too?” Jordan asked. “Why aren’t they together?”

Explaining that would be a handful, so Klaus just raised a shoulder helplessly. Allison’s eyes were filling with tears, tears that he’d put there. He sat down next to her and patted her knee in a weak attempt at comfort.

Ben was the one to say, “Allison doesn’t have custody. Do you know what custody is?”

“Yes. It’s who gets to take care of the child. If a parent is mean to their child, or doesn’t take care of them, or doesn’t want them, the other parent gets custody. But she seems so nice! And she’s rich, so she should be able to take care of a kid. Is she mean really? Is that why she has so much money and the rest of you don’t have any?”

“No, she’s not mean,” Ben said. “The court thought that the dad would be a better caretaker because... well, it’s complicated. But she loves her daughter very much.”

Allison squeezed Klaus’ hands for a moment, and then returned to writing, tears falling on the pad. “I can tell you some things. Recommend books.”

Jordan crept up on the bed and tried to pat Allison’s arm, but of course their hand went straight through. Without thinking, Klaus reached out, feeling the power flow through him.

A faint blue glow outlined Jordan’s body – and their skin connected with Allison’s.

Startled, Allison looked down, and smiled sadly at the little face beside her.

“Hi,” she mouthed.

“Hi,” Jordan said back. “You’re pretty.”

Allison smiled and brushed her fingers through Jordan’s hair, not quite able to ruffle it. She mouthed something that might have been, “Poor little thing.”

Klaus grinned in exhilaration, and jerked his head for Ben to come over.

“Hey, you try it out too! Let’s see if we can make it a double whammy!”

Ben’s face took on a tentative expression that Klaus hadn’t seen since they were kids. Slowly, he reached out, and Klaus could feel the power snatch hold of him, a second before Allison gasped.

She shot out of bed and caught Ben in an embrace that... well, okay, her arms still went partway through him, but there was _some_ kind of substance there, and Klaus hung on for dear life to keep it going.

Letting go of the hug, Allison held Ben’s face and mouthed, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Ben said.

Holding onto the sensation was harder by the minute, like keeping your hands around a large fish flopping around. Klaus’ hands started to shake, and then the connection snapped and he sank down to his knees.

There was a small, disappointed “aw!” sound from Jordan.

“Sorry,” Klaus panted. “Bit light-headed.”

His stomach gave a loud growl of complaint.

Ben, back to his ordinary state, let his arms sink. “You should eat something.”

“I had lunch at Diego’s.”

“That was hours and hours ago,” Jordan said, voice in a lecture mode better suited for someone ten times their age. “Three square meals a day is what you need, and fruit snacks in between.”

Allison, eyes still on where she had seen Ben, fumbled for her pad, and wrote, “Room service?”

“Oh, God, yes!” Klaus said, already on his way to the telephone. “Anything I want?”

She nodded, and he started leafing through the menu lying on the desk. It was full of the kind of meals he’d only been able to dream about for all of his adult life, and he was sorely tempted to order one of everything, including the breakfast food – but of course they didn’t even serve that stuff at this hour.

In the end, he settled for filet mignon with baked potato, spinach, and toasted garlic, while Allison ordered a French onion soup.

Jordan was examining the sofa. “Does this unfold? Maybe we could all sleep here!”

“We don’t sleep, sport,” Ben reminded them.

“Speak for yourself,” Klaus muttered, envying that particular ghostly ability at the moment.

“We do watch TV, though,” Jordan said. They plopped themselves down on the sofa and gave Klaus a pleading grimace. “Please?”

“Jordan would like to watch TV,” Klaus told Allison.

Allison smiled and sat down on the sofa as well, almost on top of Jordan, who inched aside at the last second. Not that it would have mattered much if they’d both occupied the same space. She zapped through a few channels, searching for something suitable.

“Ooh, _Criminal Minds_!” Jordan said, leaning closer.

“Who lets you watch _Criminal Minds_!?” Ben asked, but Allison had already continued her zapping.

Another channel had a rerun of the old _Addams Family_ TV show. Allison’s mouth quirked up, and she threw a glance at Klaus, who shrugged, not sure if it would be too close to home for their recent ghost.

But Jordan had already started humming the theme song, swinging their little feet back and forth in rhythm. And even though they were no longer corporeal enough for it to matter, they curled up next to Allison.

“I guess so,” Klaus said, sitting down in one of the armchairs.

When room service arrived with the supper, Klaus threw himself at the meal, and he had to force himself to chew slowly, savouring each bite. _Fuck_ , first-class meat, when was the last time he’d had _that_?

Once he’d emptied the whole plate, he went out to use the bathroom, and rather than returning to his chair, he lay down on top of one of the beds. Instead of giving him new energy, the food had made him drowsy. But then, it had been a crazy day. Couple of days.

He smiled at the three people sitting by the TV. Even though they were in separate worlds, they looked like a cozy little family. The wholesome TV kind, not the Hargreeves kind. People who never had to deal with apocalypses, who were living and well and all belonged together.

Okay, so it wasn’t true, but the image alone was heartwarming.

Slowly, his eyes drifted closed.

* * *

In his dream, Klaus was back in the Academy, searching through the empty rooms. Someone had been lost, even their name had been lost, so he couldn’t call out. His father’s notebooks were full of scribbles that wormed their way across the page and refused to tell him anything at all. Jungle had overgrown the corridors, and somewhere in the distance there was a desperate whimper. It had to come from behind one of the doors, but if he opened the wrong one, the thing coming out of it would eat him alive as it had eaten the others, and so he was stuck outside, listening cautiously to determine what was what.

Another voice joined in. It was Ben’s, soothing in a way he had managed in death far more often than in life. Klaus changed direction, following the sound.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying in an unfamiliar room, darker than his own ever managed to be, and with a much more comfortable bed. Blinking the sand from his eyes, he could see another bed with a sleeping figure. The faint silhouette of curls provided a name: Allison.

The sad voice remained, as did Ben’s

“I know it’s hard, but you’ll get used to it.”

Klaus craned his neck to get a better view. There was a small shape in one of the armchairs, and a bigger one by the window. Something was filling up the sofa, too, though it was too shapeless for him to figure out, in his present state, what it might be.

“I miss my bed,” said the smaller voice.

“Jordan?” Klaus called.

Jordan looked up, and moved in that unsettling instant way ghosts sometimes did, so that they were standing by his bed.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” they said.

In the dark, the faint phantom glow around them was more visible – as was the way their clothes flickered and shifted, from Christmas sweater to Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt, gut wound and all, and then back again.

“Hey, come here,” Klaus whispered, scooting over a little to make room for the child.

Jordan sat down and said, “It’s so dark, and everyone’s asleep, and it’s spooky. I want to sleep too.”

Ben was drifting over, arms crossed, looking miserable. How long had it taken him to get used to constant wakefulness?

“Okay, let’s see what we can do,” Klaus said, taking hold of Jordan’s shoulder.

Jordan sighed as they started to get more solid. “You can only manage a minute or so.”

“A minute’s better than nothing. Lie down, sweetheart.”

Jordan did as told, folded one thin spectral arm under their head, and closed their eyes.

“Ben?” Klaus asked, offering a hand, but Ben shook his head.

“Save it for Jordan. I’m fine.”

So Klaus poured as much energy as he could muster into Jordan’s little body, hoping it would be enough. It was hard to tell whether a ghost child was falling asleep or not. There were no breaths that could slow down, nor any little muscle twitches. The face looked more relaxed, perhaps, but that was all.

Unfortunately, his own body knew very well how to fall asleep, and using his powers like this only served to make him sleepier. He yawned once, twice, and tried in vain to keep his eyes open. Maybe if he concentrated on just letting the power flow, it didn’t matter if they were closed. Might even be beneficial.

Maybe.

* * *

The morning sun came accompanied with a man’s voice that, for some reason, set Klaus’ teeth on edge. He groaned in protest.

“You’re awake. Good.”

Klaus rolled over and glared at Luther, who stood at the foot of the bed, already fully dressed, overcoat and all. Allison was sitting on her own bed, busy writing something rather long on her notepad.

“Good morning to you too,” Klaus said. “Should have known the second bed was yours. Where were you last night?”

Luther looked uncomfortable. “At Vanya’s. Trying to talk things out.”

“Wow. How did _that_ go?”

“Well, she didn’t try to kill me.”

“That’s improvement, then.”

There was Ben, by the window again, keeping an eye on Jordan – who had stuck their head _through_ the window. Which was closed. Slightly unsettling, that.

Allison had finished writing and held up her pad: “We’re all in this together. Vanya too. What she did was a long time coming & you know it. If they ask questions I will lie.”

“Yeah,” Luther said. “I don’t think involving the police will end well for anyone. Especially after last time.”

“Glad that’s sorted,” Klaus said. “I’ve had it with apocalypses. Apocalypsi?”

Allison smiled and wrote, “Good morning.”

“Good morning. Thanks for letting me sleep here.”

She gave a shrug that could mean anything from ‘you’re welcome’ to ‘I couldn’t very well roll you out of bed’.

Jordan pulled their head back inside and shouted, “Punch blue buggy!” as they tried to punch Ben, who quickly faded through the fist. Jordan pouted. “Aw. Klaus, can you make me solid so I can punch you?”

“Why on earth would I do that?” Klaus asked with a snort of laughter.

Luther looked over his shoulder, and frowned slightly. “Ah. The ghosts.”

“Yes, the ghosts,” Klaus said. “Don’t sound so gloomy. It’s only your long-lost brother and a little scamp of a child. Isn’t that right, Allison?”

“Could you turn the TV back on?” said Jordan. “I don’t want to watch cars anymore.”

Klaus grabbed the remote and browsed through some channels. Sesame Street seemed suitable, and so he left that on. Good, educational entertainment.

“Don’t you have enough on your plate already?” Luther asked.

That was such a bizarre statement Klaus only stared. As if there was anything at all for him to do other than stay alive and sober, both of which were drab and thankless tasks. “No? Like what?”

“Vanya’s powers still need to be dealt with. And the academy was destroyed, and Pogo and Mom are gone, and there’s a load of practical and legal issues surrounding that, as well as the rest of Dad’s estate...”

“What am I supposed to do about any of that?” Klaus asked. “The academy – good riddance. I’ll help clean up the mess if you think there’s anything left in there. The lawyers will handle the rest of it. I’ll go to Pogo’s funeral, and Mom’s, if we’re having one for her.”

“Your mom died?” Jordan asked, looking up from the TV for a moment.

“She, uh, was a robot.”

“Your _mom_ was a _robot_?”

Ben started to explain, which left Klaus free to focus on the current conversation.

“As for Vanya... I could go see her, pep talk her a bit. Beyond that... why would she want me, in particular? We were never that close.”

Allison wrote, “Five’s with her. I’ll see her today.”

“Great. That’s covered, then.”

“So, that’s it?” Luther asked, raising his voice slightly. “You’re just heading off?”

“I’m minding a _child_ , who has lost _everything_ ,” Klaus said, and the way Jordan shrank back against the sofa at that made his heart hurt. “Including their life. And unlike everything you’ve mentioned, that’s something I can do that you guys can’t. So yeah, it’s taking priority. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to use the bathroom.” He turned to Allison. “Actually, could I take a bath, too? I don’t have one at home.”

She nodded and wrote, “Breakfast?”

“Please!”

The bathroom was luxurious even by Academy standards, and even more so compared to a plastic bucket and a garden hose connected to the sink, which were the available facilities in Klaus’s apartment. 

He soaked in the tub in what should have been perfect bliss, unfortunately marred by the nagging suspicion that Luther had a point. Dealing with Jordan was important, sure, but he _was_ shirking his responsibilities. Especially concerning Vanya. The least he could do was pay her a visit and go, hey, no hard feelings about that apocalypse.

Except, was that the truth?

The whole apocalypse business had been an accident, one they had managed to avoid with a bit of time-jumping the second time around, so no harm there. And tearing down the academy... well, who wouldn’t do the same, given the chance?

But then there was Mom and Pogo. They didn’t hurt the way Dave hurt, that raw, bleak chill in his heart that threatened to turn the world to ice. They were more like dry scabs over a wound which might start bleeding if he picked at it.

He’d left so many years ago, and barely given them a thought since then. They’d still been there, out of sight, and now they weren’t, and it didn’t feel any different.

Did he even mourn them?

His fingers curled, recalling the sensation of a small plastic cylinder that he’d once, more than twenty years ago, found in his pocket as he put his uniform on. The night before, he’d tried Mom’s lipstick, hastily putting it away when he heard footsteps in the hallway. And the next morning, there it was, with no gift note. But then, none was needed.

And whenever she wore her best shoes, she always left them in the corridor overnight, where anyone might step into them. It was to let the leather breathe, supposedly, but that couldn’t be needed with robot feet.

Gentle ape hands tending to his wounds, never a word of reproach even when the cause was his own recklessness. The closest was that time he found a pamphlet titled “Drug Use and the Brain” on his bedside table. He’d used it to roll joints.

Back in therapy, he’d joked that he’d had three parents and none of them had been human. Which may have been true, but it wasn’t fair. He’d been so angry at them for always deferring to his father’s fucked up decisions, which they had, and he was _still_ angry – but that wasn’t all they had done.

With a deep sigh, he washed the tears off his face and tried to relax into the water.

When he came back out, breakfast had arrived and his clothes were gone.

Allison handed him a pre-written note: “Sent off to laundry.”

“Excellent. I feel like Cinderella before the ball.” The silky hotel dressing gown was a dream against his skin; he was sorely tempted to keep it.

She handed him another note. That one had a list of names and titles of parenting books, along with the statement: “Your job is to make sure the child’s needs are met.”

The second part of the sentence had been crossed out: “and help them grow up to be an independent adult.”

His eyes fell on Jordan, who was sitting cross-legged at Luther’s feet, watching with clear fascination as he shoved the better part of a stack of pancakes into his mouth.

Well, damn.

“Thanks,” Klaus said quietly.


	4. Chapter 4

A couple of hours later, they were on their way to the library. Jordan was zigzagging across the street in a way that sent Klaus’s heart racing. Clearly it hadn’t got the memo on the ghost situation.

“Do you think I should talk to Vanya?” he asked Ben.

“Sure. What do you want to say?”

“Well, that’s the first problem.”

“I could talk to her, maybe. I think I’d like that.”

“She’d definitely want to talk to you,” Klaus agreed. “She liked you. Everyone does.”

Ben ducked his head down, as if there was even any point in modesty.

Jordan ran back through a yellow cab and asked, “Who’s Vanya?”

“Our sister,” Klaus said.

“Oh. Does she have powers? That big guy said she had powers. Is he your brother too? He was _really_ big. And really hairy. Like a gorilla. Is that his power? Do you all have powers?”

“Yes, yes, kind of, and yes.”

“I thought either he was another brother, or Allison’s boyfriend, but I couldn’t figure out which,” Jordan said.

“Huh.” Responding to _that_ can of worms would be something else, but Jordan was already on the next subject.

“What’s your power?” they asked Ben.

“My body is a portal to other dimensions.”

Jordan scrunched up their face.

“What does that mean?”

“That, uh, things come out through my chest. Things that don’t exist here, but do elsewhere.”

“Like that tentacle?” Jordan asked, wide-eyed. “That was real? I thought you made it up, like my claws.”

“That was real,” Ben confirmed.

“Does it hurt?”

He looked away. “Not anymore.”

There was a pause, during which Klaus wondered if he should change the subject, but the question hung in the air, and finally Jordan asked it, in a much smaller voice:

“Is that what killed you?”

Ben hesitated, then admitted, “Yeah.”

His voice was flat. The memory had to be even more brutal from the receiving end. Klaus felt bile rise up in his throat, and he’d only been a spectator. You’d think that Ben standing there in one piece ought to be enough to wipe away the horror, but some things never faded.

“And you still do it? Let them through?”

“Only when I absolutely have to.”

“I’m sorry,” Klaus said, referring to what had happened the night before in the lobby.

“It’s okay,” Ben said with a shrug. “Anyway, it’s not all bad. I think the portal may be a contributing reason why I’m a bit more _here_ than other ghosts, like why you can still see me when you’re...” He broke off.

“When he’s what?” Jordan asked.

“It’s easier, that’s all.”

“And here I thought you were just a stubborn bastard,” Klaus said softly.

Ben smiled. “Well, yes, that too.”

They’d reached the library by then, and Jordan hesitated a bit, going up the stairs. “Could they hurt me?”

“Could who hurt you?” Ben asked.

“The monsters inside you.”

“No. I’d never let them.” He reached out a hand, and Jordan took it.

Klaus stood still for a moment behind them, taking in the sight of Ben looking so peaceful. Then he shook it off, and hurried his steps to catch up with them. After all, he was the one who would have to search the library catalogue.

649.1 was parenting, and soon they stood in front of the shelf, scrutinizing the books.

“ _The Explosive Child_ ,” Klaus read. “That sounds alarming. Maybe that’s what we should have got for Vanya. But Jordan doesn’t strike me as explosive, are you, Jordan?”

Jordan laughed and threw out their arms. “BOOM!”

“Noooo, not explosive. Let’s see what else he’s written. _Raising Human Beings_. I guess you can’t go wrong with that.”

“They’re a ghost,” Ben pointed out.

“Yeah, but still a human ghost.” Klaus tucked the book under his arm. “What else is on the list? _Raising an emotionally intelligent child_.”

“Doesn’t that require an emotionally intelligent adult?” Ben teased.

“Well, in that case, tag, you’re it.”

“If I wasn’t a human ghost,” Jordan said, “I could be a dragon ghost. Or a penguin ghost. Do animals have ghosts?”

“Sometimes,” Klaus said absent-mindedly, still reading blurbs. “They’re not much trouble, for the most part. You know, this one looks pretty good.”

He leaned against the side of the shelf and leafed through the pages, until Jordan started fidgeting and complained:

“Can we go to the children’s section? This is boring!”

“Sure.” There wasn’t much point in overdoing it with the parenting books – better to read a few properly and then replace them.

Jordan brightened. “I want _The Marvelous Land of Oz_ , that’s my favourite!”

“You mean _The Wizard of Oz_? Like the movie?”

“No, it has to be _The Marvelous Land._ Not any of the other ones.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“Something with ghosts. Nice ghosts, like me!”

Having storytime about ghosts wasn’t on top of Klaus’s to-do-list, but he supposed part of dealing with children was doing things you didn’t like.

With the aid of the children’s librarian, he found the section for ghost stories, and was even given a recommendation of assorted books to choose from. Apparently, nice ghosts were quite common in children’s literature.

“Not undead pets,” Jordan said dismissively. “I want something with people. That one!”

They pointed to a book where a skeleton and a sad ghost lady were flanking a little boy with a funky-looking bird in his arms.

“ _The Beasts of Clawstone Castle_ ,” Klaus read. “Sounds like pets to me.”

Jordan looked at him like he was uncommonly stupid. “ _She’s_ a person, and so’s _that_.”

Ben looked over Klaus’s shoulder and chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a skeleton in a hat and bow tie.”

“I doubt a real one would look so jolly,” Klaus said grimly and added the book to his pile.

They probably should be looking for educational material as well. Something on a second grade reading level, maybe some maths or other textbooks. But doing that meant Klaus would have to _teach_ all that stuff to Jordan too, and that was a task better left for another... week. Month.

Perhaps he could convince Ben to take Jordan out on some practical excursions. Count the cars, read the street signs, that sort of thing.

So instead of looking for more books, Klaus steered towards a group of kids gathering on the floor around a lady in a wide orange dress. “Seems like there’s a performance starting. You want to watch?”

“Sure,” Jordan said and sat down.

Klaus hung around the back for a while, as the lady set up the drops for a puppet theater, but as she untangled the strings of a marionette she halted and asked him, “Are you here with someone?”

Yeah, that wouldn’t look too good, a solitary man hanging around the preschoolers. He hastily stood up and pointed towards the exit. “I’ll just go get these books checked out.”

Ben gave him a sympathetic smile. “We’ll be with you in a while, yeah?”

So Klaus tottered off, and on a normal day, this would have been the dream, getting some time on his own without any ghosts pestering him. Yet without these particular ghosts, he was at a loss of things to do. His surroundings settled into a sort of beige, despite the colourful art filling the walls.

It had been ages since he last checked anything out of the library, but his card was still valid – with an old as fuck address, but there was no need for the librarian to know that. Once he’d got that done, he sat down in an armchair by the main entrance and figured he might as well start reading.

_ “That’s because good parenting requires more than intellect. It touches a dimension of the personality that’s been ignored in much of the advice dispensed to parents over the past thirty years. Good parenting involves emotion.” _

“Ha-double-fucking-ha to you, Dad, if you’re still watching,” Klaus muttered, trying to ignore the way his stomach lurched. Sure, he was more emotionally aware than his father, as if that was any great accomplishment, but he still might have bitten off more than he could chew.

At least he’d been to therapy a few times and could accurately _name_ some emotions, but he was still just used to handling them in himself, not other people. And the last ten months had brought a shitload of new ones, as well, the worst and best that he’d ever experienced.

Poor Jordan, getting stuck in that tangled mess. At least Ben was there to provide at least some sort of stability.

“Have you seen Jordan?” Ben asked in his ear.

Klaus jumped a little. “What? No. Wait, aren’t they with you?”

“They were. But, you know, storytime was going fine so I figured I’d browse the shelves a bit, and then when I looked back, they were gone.”

“Damn it!” Klaus jumped up and started looking around frantically. “Jordan! Jordan, where are you? Okay, you re-check this floor, I’ll get started on the next. JORDAN!”

He was already on the way up the stairs when one of the librarians caught up with him.

“Sir, can I help you? Did you lose somebody?”

“Yes. No – no, you wouldn’t have seen them. Never mind.” Under his breath, as his gaze frantically scanned the room, he groaned, “Jordan, what the fuck? Don’t do this!”

“Are you... feeling okay?”

Ah, yes, _that_ tone of voice. The gentle suspicion that this one might be crazy. At least she didn’t seem about to throw him out on his ass. Only a matter of time before some kind of intervention, if he kept this up.

He leaned over the railing and called, “Ben! Change of plans! You take indoors, I take outdoors!”

Ben nodded, and Klaus turned on his heel, going back down the stairs. The librarian followed, her colorful scarf fluttering behind her like a revamped pride flag.

“Is there someone we should call? Or perhaps you require some sort of... uh... medication?”

He laughed out loud at the suggestion. Every cell in his body ached for drugs. “Better not or I’ll never find them. Listen, you’ve been super helpful. Really. But I’ve got to go.”

Clutching the books to his chest like sheer pressure could stop his heart from pounding, Klaus rushed outside and kept calling Jordan’s name.

There was nothing. Not in the street, or the backyard, or even the bushes he clambered his way through.

When Ben joined him a while later, it was with an anguished expression he’d rarely shown in death.

“If they’re in there, they’re hiding better than I can find.”

“Why would they hide from us? That makes no sense.” Desperate for any kind of solution, Klaus offered, “Maybe they went home.”

“Home to us or home to their mom?”

“Either. Just, would you please go look?”

Ben vanished, and Klaus sat down with his back to the building, legs too wobbly to carry him anymore.

People took detours around him, probably assuming he was a panhandler. Maybe he should take the opportunity to actually panhandle – he could use the money – but he couldn’t get his mind to stop fretting long enough to try it.

At least Jordan couldn’t be _hurt_. Dead was dead, you didn’t get any more hurt than that. But they could be gone. Gone to the great beyond without so much as a word goodbye, and calling them back from that was a shot in the dark.

With shivering fingers, Klaus unlaced his shoes and took them off. He arranged his limbs in the lotus position and tried to find the peace of mind that was supposed to come with it.

“Hey!”

A security guard. Fan-fucking-tastic. He supposed he should be grateful it wasn’t a cop.

“You can’t sit here!”

“Relax, I’m just meditating. Not hurting anyone.”

“Well, you can’t do it here. Come on, get!”

The guard waved his baton around, which was about the most pathetic piece of grandstanding Klaus had seen. Sure, he was beefy-looking, but his stance was off-balance and the muscles built more for show than strength. Even after decades of drug use, Klaus could take him down, no problem, just like riding a bicycle.

But it wouldn’t be worth the trouble that would follow.

So instead, he picked up the books and his shoes and stood up, raising his arms. “Okay, okay. I’m going. I’m gone.”

Going where, was the question. Back to the apartment made the most sense, and Ben would find him there sooner or later, but he didn’t want it to be later. If Ben found out what had happened to Jordan, Klaus wanted to know right away, so he wouldn’t have to feel like this a second longer than necessary.

He walked slowly down the street, trying not to think about the roads he could take that would lead to various drug joints. God, he knew this city too well. He should have moved somewhere he didn’t know any sellers. Miami, maybe. Weather was bound to be better there too.

Walking all the way home wasn’t an option, so in the end he jumped the tourniquet to the nearest subway station. He got lucky, and there was no ticket inspection until a few stations away from home, at which point he sneaked out without getting caught.

When he reached his own apartment block, Ben was standing outside it, looking forlorn and as dishevelled as a ghost could do. Klaus’ heart sank.

“Nothing?” he asked.

Ben shook his head. “I checked the Plaza too, just in case.”

“Diego’s place?”

“Good call.”

Ben disappeared, and Klaus paced outside the door, too stressed to even go inside.

A little while later, Ben returned, still alone. Klaus cursed.

“Do you think they’re really gone? Like, gone-gone?”

Ben shook his head slowly, in a gesture that signalled helplessness more than denial.

“Or do you think they’re just lost somewhere?” Klaus continued. “Damn it, this city is huge, and we can’t even put up missing kids posters. And I can’t get in the right state for a proper séance, even without drugs. So fucking useless.”

“Well, when ghosts are lost, they tend to go to....” Ben drifted off. “Oh.”

“What?”

The dejection gave way in Ben’s eyes for something approaching excitement, and he held up a finger. “I’ve got an idea.”

With that, he vanished again. Klaus, feeling a little bit more hopeful, went up to the apartment and sat down to wait.

About ten minutes later, Ben showed up again. This time, _finally_ , Jordan was with him, looking little and lost and back in their old bloody T-shirt.

“Jesus Christ, kid,” Klaus said, air going out of him like a leaky balloon. “Where have you _been_!?”

“I just meant to pop home for a bit,” Jordan said, with a sob in their voice. “All those moms in the library... I was gonna come right back after, but then I couldn’t find the library, and I wandered around in the mist and when I came out of it I was... I was...”

“At the intersection,” Ben said, sitting down next to Klaus. “I should have figured it out sooner. I don’t know how many times I drifted back to Central Station in the first months after I died.”

“Place of death,” Klaus said. In hindsight, it was so obvious. Lots of dead people showed up where they had died. He just hadn’t ever talked to Ben about it or realized that it wasn’t by choice. “Well, aren’t we a pair of idiots.” Spreading his arms, he told Jordan, “Come here.”

Jordan dived towards him, and despite the bone-deep weariness he felt, he managed to muster up enough juice to give them a hug.

“Don’t ever go off without telling us again, okay?” he murmured into their hair. “You want to see your mom, you ask Ben to take you. Or me, if you want to talk to her. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jordan said. “I’m sorry. I really thought I’d be right back.”

“I understand. We just got really scared, that’s all.”

From the look of them, Jordan had been pretty scared too, which made it pretty hard to be angry with them. Probably Klaus should impose some sort of punishment, to hammer home the gravity of the situation, but with his predominant emotion being relief, getting in the right stern mood wasn’t doable. Anyway, it seemed like overkill. The kid clearly wasn’t about to head off on their own again any time soon.

So instead, Klaus sat down on the bed with Jordan curled up next to him and Ben on the other side, trying to get his racing heart to understand the concept of “all clear”. After all of that, even a low-energy activity like reading out loud felt too much for him, but he held the book open for Ben to read, and let his muscles relax.

“There are children whose best friends have two legs,” Ben read, “and there are children whose best friends have four – or a thousand, or none at all....”

They were almost done with chapter 1 when Klaus saw the pattern of Jordan’s clothes blur and change. He smiled over their head at Ben, who smiled back at him. The reindeer sweater had returned.

* * *

After moving out of the Academy, Klaus had ditched the habit of regular hours as soon as he could manage, and that hadn’t changed. Without drugs, he was tired pretty much all the time, and even more so on a day like this. So despite the sunny sky, he fell asleep in the afternoon and only woke up well after midnight, from his stomach growling.

Neither Ben nor Jordan were in sight, but he could hear their voices, faintly, and when he looked out the window there they were, sitting on the stairs outside, talking. Probably ghosts had a lot to talk about.

There wasn’t much food, but he had a packet of ramen, and as he boiled and ate it, he thought about money.

As in, there wasn’t any. And if he was serious about getting off the drugs, he shouldn’t be selling either, so that was one method less of gaining income. Most of his others – stealing, panhandling, whoring, living off whoever had the highest tolerance for moochers – weren’t a good idea with a kid in tow, ghost or not. He had to set a... well, a not too terrible example.

Allison wouldn’t stay around long enough to be mooched from, he still couldn’t bring himself to talk to Vanya, and Diego was almost as piss-poor as Klaus was. Even Luther was homeless now, with the Academy a pile of rubble.

Klaus frowned, fork stopping on the way to his mouth. Rubble, sure, but even Vanya’s destructive powers might have left _something_ he could sell.

Quickly, he stuffed the last remaining noodles into his mouth, got dressed, and headed downstairs.

As he stepped out into the chilly night air, he called to Jordan, “Hey, kid, you want to go treasure hunting?”

Jordan glided up to him in that smooth phantom way. “Go where?”

“The Academy. This... uh... house that got torn down. There may be stuff still in it.”

“What are you doing?” Ben asked flatly, approaching at a more normal pace.

“Think about it,” Klaus said. “That mansion was crammed with all kinds of expensive shit. It can’t all be ruined. Yeah, Vanya got super trigger happy, it’s all chunks and pieces, but some of those chunks and pieces may be valuable. And unlike you guys, I need to eat. Not to mention pay rent.”

“Yeah,” Jordan said, eager and alert. If they’d had a tail, they would have been wagging it. “Of course. We’re on it. Right, Ben?”

Ben sighed, then nodded. “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

* * *

Which, as it turned out, it could.

Standing in front of the haphazard piles of rock _hurt_. There were few good memories from that luxurious hellscape Klaus had once had the misfortune to call his home. He’d been relieved to leave it behind when he moved out, but it seemed part of his soul was still tethered to the place. Enough that, now that it was irrevocably gone, part of him missed it. And how fucked up was that?

There was even an excavator standing at the edge of the property, though it didn’t seem to have made much headway yet. On order from the city authorities, or one of his siblings? Either way, it meant that his best chance of finding anything of value was to dig through as much as possible in one night.

“Okay,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll start lifting things over here, you two look around, and if you find anything, give me a shout.”

Ben’s face was closed down, but he gave Klaus a silent nod and sank through one of the piles, presumably going down to the basement level.

Jordan seemed to take it as an adventure, skipping this way and that, poking their head down various places.

It didn’t take long for Ben to reappear. “Found the silverware. The cupboard’s been smashed, but some of the things inside may still be salvageable. Give me a boost and I’ll clear the path.”

“Yes!” Klaus hissed. “Good thinking!”

This was hitting the jackpot. Even as scrap metal, you could get some money from silver, and if there were intact pieces, that was better still.

Giving Ben enough physicality so that his monsters could throw the rubble around was, on the whole, probably less effort than digging would have been. It was only ten minutes before they were standing in the semi-stable pit of what had once been the kitchen, rummaging through the splinters of a grand oak cupboard. And yeah, some of the cutlery was bent, some plates were dented and some bowls far too flat, but there was still enough to sell, and Klaus took his coat off, filling it with silver.

There was a scream from up above, and Klaus instantly let go of Ben, starting to climb the rubble to get to Jordan.

The bricks slid away under his feet, and the ceiling seemed about to cave in over his head. Ben tossed up a tentacle, but it went right through the floorboards, and he quickly reached out to grab Klaus again.

The hand closed around Klaus’s wrist, tingling against the touch, and then there was a similar tingle at his back, yielding slightly but still firm enough to help push him up the wall. It seemed Ben’s accompanying monsters were in a helpful mood.

Once topside again, he called, “Jordan?”

“I’m fine,” Jordan called back, voice a little higher-pitched than usual. “I thought I found a dead body, but it’s some sort of doll.”

“Mom,” Klaus breathed. He rushed over and knelt down to dig out the remains of her robotic body.

The arm sticking out from the shattered bricks seemed intact enough, but the torso it was attached to had caved in, chest resembling nothing more than a high technology salad bowl. The face had been torn off the head, scalp slipped to the side, exposing the metal and wires below.

He had to fight the bile rising in his throat.

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

“Our mom,” Ben said. Klaus hadn’t noticed him arriving, but there he was, arms wrapped around himself. When he’d been a kid, that would have been a sure sign he was about to cry. Of course, he couldn’t, now.

Klaus, with no such limitations, wiped away his own tears and kept searching for more parts.

“Right,” Jordan said. “The robot.” They sat down cross-legged next to Klaus. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said, untangling bits of isolation from mom’s body so he could throw away the wall boards they were attached to. “Hey, you haven’t seen a chimp, have you?”

“A real chimp, or a toy?”

“A ghost chimp. Or body, maybe. In a suit, and with a little cane... if he’s still got the cane.”

After a moment’s pause, Jordan asked, “You don’t think I’d _tell_ you if I saw that?”

A breathy laugh escaped Klaus’s lips. “Good point.”

His fingernail broke off against a piece of concrete. He tossed the lump aside and sat down, trying to steady his shivering limbs.

Whatever had happened to Mom’s legs and other arm, he couldn’t get to them.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, chest tightening at the futility of the statement. Mom couldn’t hear him, she was well and truly _gone_ in a way other people weren’t, not even when he was too fucked up with drugs and booze for any real contact. They’d always be there, beyond the veil. But not her. Just an electronic junk pile, now.

On unsteady legs, he got back up, having lost all desire to explore. Only basic self-preservation made him go back for the silver, bundling up Mom’s remains with the bowls and cutlery in his coat, the smithereens of dinner times long since past.

All three of them were rather subdued, making their way back. At first, Klaus walked in a daze, his sleep-deprived thoughts stuck on the explosion, and Mom’s face looking out from a window as the walls came down, her expression placid even as she died, as if nothing was amiss at all.

The cold night air nipped at his skin and made his nose run, but he hunched his shoulders up, sniffed a little, and adjusted the weight of the coat-bundle in his arms.

Diego had screamed at him not to leave Mom behind.

Well, he wasn’t. For all the good it did.

Without thinking, he changed direction.

“Where are we going?” Ben asked.

Klaus stopped for a second, contemplating the answer of that, which his feet already seemed to know.

“Diego’s gym.”

Understanding dawned in Ben’s eyes, and he nodded.

“Is it closer?” Jordan asked.

“A bit,” Klaus said, though of course that wasn’t the reason.

They all walked for some time in silence. Even Jordan hadn’t said much. Whether it was because they were affected by the strange mood of the other two, or had their own private somber thoughts, was hard to tell.

Klaus wasn’t sure how long it took, just that by the time they reached that ugly concrete building, his feet were hot and blistered, and the rest of him shivering with cold. 

The door was, obviously, locked. He pounded on it for a while, then tried a silver bowl against the window beside it. No use.

“Plexiglass,” Ben said. “Maybe if you solidify me enough, I can smash through it.”

“Breaking and entering,” Klaus said. “Diego’s gonna love that. Yeah, okay.”

“I could scream,” Jordan offered.

That was a somewhat neater solution, and Klaus considered it. “Loud enough to hear inside?”

Without a word, Ben gently steered Jordan into the building, grabbed their hand, and placed it in Klaus’s. It was a weird sight, just the little hand sticking out through the door, but the barrier proved to make very little difference. Concentrating, Klaus felt Jordan growing solid, and a second later, they screamed.

Yikes, they had some pipes for a corpse. Klaus had no idea if the scream was audible to a normal person, but it was quite literally enough to raise the dead, as the ghostly boxer soon stuck his scowling face through the wall.

“What’s going on?” he barked.

“Private conversation, bye,” Klaus replied. He yanked Jordan back out and ruffled their hair. “Excellent work, kid. If you ever tire of this side of the pond, you could have your afterlife set out for you as an Irish banshee.”

Jordan grinned. “Did it work?”

“Let’s wait and see.”

It took maybe fifteen minutes, enough time for Klaus’s ass to become a numb entity detached from the rest of his body. Then Diego rushed out the door, fully dressed, knives, domino mask and all.

“Aww,” Klaus said. “You didn’t have to get all dolled up for my sake.”

Diego tucked away his weapon so he could cross his arms instead. “What are you doing here?”

“I brought Mom. Well... bits of her.”

All expression disappeared from Diego’s face. His eyes fell on Klaus’s bundled-up coat, and he beelined for it straight through Ben and Jordan – though of course he couldn’t know that.

Kneeling down on the ground, Diego pulled aside the front of the coat, and scowled. “Silverware?”

Klaus shrugged. “What can I say? I’m broke.”

He expected some pushback, but got none, as Diego opened the coat further and gave off a strangled sob at the sight of those dented robotic limbs.

“Hey.” Klaus sank down next to him, awkwardly stroking those hunched-up, shaking shoulders. He searched for something to say, something in the line of “it’s okay”, but that would be such an obvious lie he couldn’t bring the words to his lips.

Ben sat down on the ground, cross-legged, and took Klaus’s hand. Once his other arm had enough substance, he wrapped it around Diego’s shoulders.

Diego looked up for a second, his eyes widening, and then they closed in pain, as his sobs got harder and he clung to Ben like a man drowning.

It was so easy to forget that for everyone else, Ben had been gone for these past thirteen years, not just inconveniently discorporated. For their sakes, Klaus held on as long as he could, but after a minute, his hands shook with the effort, and all he could feel in the rest of his body was the biting cold tearing at his bones.

“Sorry,” he gasped, dropping the touch. “Don’t want to ruin the moment, but do you think we could step inside? I’m freezing out here.”

Diego pulled himself together and nodded, gathering up Mom’s remains in the coat again, gently cradling it in his arms as he stood up.

One of the spoons fell onto the ground, and Klaus picked it up with clumsy fingers.

“Do you plan on keeping all that stuff?” Diego asked as he unlocked the front door.

“I need the money,” Klaus pointed out. “We could split it, but... between the seven of us, I doubt there’d be enough left for me to pay the rent.”

“Six.”

“Okay, yeah, six, I guess. Still.”

They stepped inside, and the warmth of the gym reinforced the chill in Klaus’s body. His teeth started chattering.

Diego’s jaw set, and he steered Klaus down the corridor. “Shower,” he said. “Then we’ll sort this stuff out. Did dad’s lawyer get hold of you? He couldn’t reach you on your phone number.”

“I sold my phone,” Klaus said. “A few months ago.”

“Jesus Christ, Klaus!”

“I needed the money.”

“Yeah? How much drugs did you get for it?”

Klaus really wished Diego wouldn’t talk about the drug thing in front of Jordan – but then, Diego had no way of knowing that the little ghost was walking backwards down the corridor singing “can’t read my poker face” over and over to themself.

“What did the lawyer want?”

“Reading of the will’s on Thursday. It got postponed in accordance with dad’s wishes – I guess he wanted to wait out the apocalypse – and then postponed again when the mansion went down. But it seems they’re ready now.”

“Yeah? You think we’ll get anything? Or that there’s anything _to_ get?”

“I don’t know,” Diego said. He dived into his own room for a towel, which he handed to Klaus, giving him a soft shove towards the nearest changing room. “But I do know we’re expected to be there. And I for one plan to.”


	5. Chapter 5

Klaus had plenty of time to think it over, during the next couple of days. In the end, Diego hadn’t given him much grief about keeping the silverware, so he’d taken it to the pawnbroker and got enough money to pay next month’s rent _and_ with 500 dollars to spare. And that was one corner of one room of that pile of rubble, so there might be enough left, after all, to make it worth his time.

Provided he’d even be given any inheritance, of course. There was a substantial risk he’d have been left out of the will. Maybe just him, specifically, or maybe all of them except Luther. There was no telling. Of course he could pop up and ask the old man himself, but that would be even more humiliating than whatever he would hear from the lawyer.

So he supposed he’d have to go, and hope that if he _had_ been disinherited, he wouldn’t be the only one left with zilch.

Then again, if he was, that meant more potential people to ask for money. If it was just Luther, he’d never be able to mooch off enough to live on.

Either way, he’d have to go there to find out.

In the meantime, he tried to keep his mind occupied with other stuff. Reading the ghost story to Jordan worked pretty well. Reading the parenting books to himself didn’t work at all, since every page made him want to scream in his father’s face.

( _“If you want to see your child handle feelings, cope with stress, and develop healthy relationships, you don’t shut down or ignore expressions of negative emotion; you engage with your child and offer guidance.”_ FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.)

The park offered no distraction, and watching the ocean just made his stomach lurch.

When Thursday came around, he walked up the stairs to the lawyer’s office, figuring that, whatever was said in there, at least he’d made it this far, and sober no less.

Ben and Jordan were with him, taking advantage of the fact that gravity didn’t apply to them by sliding up the bannister.

“How much money do you think you’ll get?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Dad didn’t like me much.”

“He didn’t like any of us much,” Ben said. “But we were his duty. I’m betting you’re still in his will.”

“What about you?” Jordan asked.

“I’m dead, sport. I can’t legally inherit anything.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

Ben laughed. “I can’t _use_ anything, either.”

Their light-hearted comments made Klaus feel somewhat better – at least until he made it to the right floor and stepped into the room where his siblings were gathered.

It was crammed with ghosts.

Bloody, mangled ghosts, with missing pieces and faces twisted in agony and rage. This wasn’t your regular graveyard or hospital crowd. Every single one of these people had died a violent, horrifying, _drawn-out_ death, and they were very clearly not over it.

Even Jordan pulled back at the sight and pressed their back against Ben’s legs.

“The fuck?” Klaus whispered. “Who are you people?”

It was like a battlefield. No, worse than a battlefield. There was something malicious, deliberate about these injuries that couldn’t be accomplished with a gun. The only time he’d seen anything like it was when he’d been kidnapped by Hazel and Cha-cha.

A suspicion cold as steel settled in his stomach, just as the ghosts caught on to the fact that he could see them and started talking, shouting, clamoring for his attention, several of them pointing in the same direction... towards Five.

“Mr. Hargreeves?”

Klaus turned on his heel and ran, ignoring his family and the man who’d tried to speak to him, and the ghosts that still followed as he took the stairs in double strides.

Five had killed all those people.

He’d known that, but he hadn’t _known_ it. Never sober enough to see it with his own eyes. And know they’d always be there, every time he’d try to speak to his brother. Screaming in his ears, the way they were right now.

There was a bar at the corner of the block, and it was open even during office hours. Klaus stepped inside, found a table with a mostly full bottle of whiskey, and helped himself to its contents.

“Hey!” the customer protested, getting off his bar stool. He was a broad-shouldered guy in his forties, with a redness to his face that suggested this early drinking was a habit.

Klaus decked him with one blow. It was so easy, he felt a moment’s surprise. The muscles he’d had at seventeen were long gone, but some of the technique remained.

The clamor around him dimmed into background noise. A few more drinks would make it all go away completely – but he wouldn’t get a chance to drink more at this bar.

Might take more than drinks anyway.

He made it outside without having to resort to more violence, but bumped into Ben on the sidewalk.

“Klaus.” Ben tried to block his path, but the alcohol was working – Klaus stepped through him without any trouble. “Come on. Stop this.”

“Yeah, no,” Klaus said. There were usually some dealers over by the McDonald’s drive thru ten blocks away. He could finish the bottle on the way over.

Ben followed him. “They’re leaving. You don’t need to do this.”

“Five killed those people,” Klaus said, gesturing vaguely behind him towards what was now barely more than shadows. “Our brother. And I need to talk to him about it. And in order to do _that_ , I need... whatever I can get. More than this. Fuck off.”

“What about Jordan?” Ben called.

Klaus halted, and looked over his shoulders, but if Jordan was still there, they had already faded out of his sight. Not as persistent as the murder victims. “Take them home.”

“Klaus...”

“You know where I’m going. They shouldn’t see that. Take them _home_.”

As he continued on his way he squared his shoulders, ready for more arguments, but none came.

* * *

An hour later, Klaus was standing outside Vanya’s place. Between the whiskey and the pills, his nerves were comfortably dull, and even the living people passing by were looking a bit hazy around the edges.

He leaned on the doorbell, and soon Vanya came to the door.

“Hey, sis. I thought we should talk. Actually, I need to talk to Five. But you and me too, definitely.”

“Five’s not here,” she said. “He needed to get legally declared alive. It’s a bit complicated.”

“It would be,” Klaus agreed. There was a really irritating, persistent ringing noise in his ears. After some thought, he shifted position and got his elbow off the doorbell. “How are you? Feeling okay? Or about to go homicidal? Sorry. That was... not what I wanted to say at all. I’m kind of... fuzzy right now. I’m sorry. Actually, I’m sorry for all of it. What you said in your book, about me, when we were teens, you were right. I don’t like it, but you were right. I’ve had to apologize to a lot of people over the years, never got around to apologizing to you. I’m sorry.”

He met her eyes, which were full of tears, yet narrowed in a way that along with her clenched jaw suggested barely controlled rage. Such a strange sight, in his usually so meek sister. At least she didn’t seem about to go into full telekinetic murder mode.

Maybe he was tempting fate, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “I’m still mad at you, though. For Mom and Pogo. I get it, I do, but... I’m mad at you.”

For a moment, she remained silent, watching him. Then she stepped aside. “Come in.”

Her apartment was a lot nicer than his, yet there was a drab quality to it, like one of those halfway houses where nobody working there had enough energy left to give a shit about decorating.

Vanya walked ahead of him into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on and then sat down, gesturing for him to do the same.

“I’m mad at you too,” she said in a quivering voice.

“Good. Good. You should be.”

“You let him lock me up in that room, treat me like a monster. I was so scared, and all of you acted like I was doing it on purpose.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“What about the rest of it? All of our _lives_. Did you mean that?”

The window panes were rattling now. Perhaps telling the truth was dangerous, with her current mood, but lying would be worse.

“Some of it.”

She let out a scoff of laughter that was half sob. “You were such a sweet kid. Once.”

“And then I grew cruel,” he said, citing her book. “I’d love to blame the drugs, but that’s a fucking lie. I was just angry. At dad, and the ghosts, and our lives. You were... easy. A safe target. That’s all.”

“Well, I’m not safe now,” she said bitterly. “Better apologize, eh?”

“That’s not why I’m...” The floorboards were trembling now too, which made the apartment feel uncomfortably like a ship at sea. “Sorry, do you think you could keep the floor still? I don’t want to puke all over it.”

Vanya took a deep breath, and the movement stopped. The kettle too turned off, water boiling, and she got up to fill the tea cups.

“I’ve got some anger of my own to work through,” she said over her shoulder.

“Yeah. I get that.”

“I feel _everything_.” As she put the cups down, tea sloshed over the side, forming a puddle on the table. “I haven’t felt anything in so long, and now, all at once. It’s a lot.”

“I know the feeling,” he said and took his cup, closing both hands around it to keep it steady. “I’d offer drugs, but... better not.”

“I don’t want any!” She frowned. “I thought you were getting sober too.”

“I was. I am. Bit of a setback. All of Five’s ghosts.” The memory rose to the front of his mind, and he groaned. “Oh. Shouldn’t have thought about that.”

“Is it true you’ve got a child? A ghost child?”

The reminder stung, and he winced. “Jordan. Almost a week now. Stunning role model, aren’t I? A good thing Ben’s around.”

“Is he? Right now?”

There was so much hope in Vanya’s voice that Klaus hated having to let her down. She deserved having a supporting spectral brother, much more than he did.

“No. I sent them home.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders deflated, and she stood up, taking her cup with her to stand looking out the window.

Comfort. She needed comfort, and since he was here, it was up to him to provide it. He stood up, rather unsteadily, and wrapped his arms around her.

Her body remained stiff and unchanging under the hug, but at least she didn’t shake him off or attack him.

“I’m sorry about Mom,” she said to the view outside. “And... sometimes I’m sorry about Pogo too. Not all the time. It’s complicated.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, leaning his chin against her shoulder.

The tension in her body eased a little.

“You can wait here for Five, if you want. I’ll make some lunch.”

“Thanks. I’d like that.”

* * *

It took a few more hours for anyone else to show up in Vanya’s apartment, and when he did, it wasn’t Five.

Klaus was washing his hands after a bathroom break when a face appeared at the edge of his vision – but not in the mirror in front of him.

At first his body readied itself for battle, but when he turned around and recognized the guy, the sensation stopped, and he gave a curt laugh instead.

“ _You’re_ still hanging around?”

Harold glowered at him. “You can tell that little bitch...”

Klaus still wasn’t fully sober, and he could see the wall right behind Harold. Any physical confrontation should have been beyond his power. But his hand shot out and caught the other man around the throat.

“No, I don’t think I will,” he said sweetly. “See, I’m not... I’m not a violent person. I don’t go around punching everything, or throwing knives at everything, or, sheesh, _killing_ everything. You know? Like my brothers. But they can’t do what I do, so I guess it’s up to me to step up to the plate and say this.” His grip tightened. “I wasn’t afraid of you when you were alive, I’m not about to start now. Leave my sister alone, or I’ll punch out your phantom teeth and exorcise you to the deepest fiery pits of hell. Stalker.”

“Klaus?” Vanya called from the kitchen. “Were you saying something?”

“Don’t think I won’t,” Klaus hissed at Harold, who quietly melted away under his fingers, though it was probably too much to hope that he would stay that way. “Yeah, uh, sorry, Vanya, I think I’ll be leaving after all. Thanks for the food. Tell Five to call me, okay? Or, well, tell him to call Diego and we’ll sort it out from there.”

Vanya stepped into the hallway and frowned at him. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure. Hey, if you ever need me, for whatever reason, just let me know and I’ll be there, okay? How about another hug? Is that too much? Hug?”

A tiny smile appeared at one corner of her mouth, and she shrugged.

“Hug,” Klaus determined and hugged her, giving her a kiss on the forehead for good measure. It was too much to say that she hugged him back, but she did give him an awkward little pat on the arm. Affection was just something they’d have to build up to.

* * *

When Klaus returned home, he found Ben sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, with Jordan curled up in his arms.

Ghosts couldn’t cry, but Jordan had once again shifted back into the outfit they’d died in. That gory T-shirt was becoming as reliable as a mood ring, and tears would have been a lot less disturbing.

“Klaus?” they said in a trembling voice.

Klaus sighed. “I’m so sorry, kid.”

At that greeting, Jordan pummeled towards him with the force of a wrecking ball, and Klaus summoned up all the power he could muster to meet the hug – which he did just a moment too late, so the little ghost half sunk into his body at first.

“I was so scared! There were all those ghosts and we tried to scare them off, but then you ran away, and when we found you, you couldn’t hear me! And then you went to see that man, and Ben said we had to go home, but I didn’t want to go home, I wanted to make you hear me, but you _couldn’t_ , and he made me go, and I didn’t know what had happened to you!”

Klaus swallowed hard at the thought of what Jordan would have seen if they’d stayed just a little longer. What Ben had been forced to see too many times to count. “Thank you,” he told Ben over Jordan’s head.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Ben said, glowering at him. “What the _hell_ , Klaus?”

“I got overwhelmed. I’m sorry.”

Jordan looked up, wide-eyed. “Those were a _lot_ of ghosts. We tried to help you.”

“I know. I appreciate it.”

“Why couldn’t you hear me anymore?”

“I took some... things, to make me stop seeing ghosts.”

“What kind of things?”

“Uh, alcohol. And then pills.”

Jordan frowned, trying to parse this. “I can understand that you didn’t want to see those ghosts. But what about Ben and me? Don’t you want to see us either?”

“It’s not that. It’s just, this whole ghost whisperer thing, I never asked for it. I’ve spent most of my life trying to run from it.”

He wanted to explain how this warped connection to the dead made it nearly impossible for him to connect to the living. The weird looks he got when he talked to someone other people couldn’t hear. The demands from both living and dead that he should connect them with their loved ones, even if they were total strangers and no one in their right mind ought to think he had any obligation to them whatsoever. The shitty foundation laid by his dad and the hours in that mausoleum.

But his audience consisted of a seven-year-old very dead child, who he had already let down once today, and so he forced himself to lay off the pity party and at least try to provide some comfort.

“Not you, though. I may fuck up most of the time.” He grimaced. “Like using words I definitely shouldn’t. But I do want to be there for you.”

“So then you won’t do it again,” Jordan said, and the hopeful note in their voice was almost too much to handle.

Klaus looked over at Ben who shook his head, looking more sad than angry, now.

Well. This was one conversation he supposed was inevitable, sooner or later. Slowly, he sat down on the bed, and made room for the ghosts beside him.

“Do you know what addiction is?”

Jordan shook their head.

“Drugs?”

“Like medicine?”

“Sometimes they’re medicine.” Klaus’s fingertips raked over the ‘goodbye’ in his hand. There had been too many times when that was his attitude to all of mankind. “Sometimes they’re bad for you. And sometimes they’re kind of both. When I was a kid, I was scared of ghosts. Really scared. And I didn’t know how to stop seeing them, until I discovered that if I got drunk, or I took drugs, they went away.”

“They didn’t really go away,” Jordan said. “Not if they were like me. You just stopped seeing them.”

“I know. But it was some solace for a while. Except those kind of drugs... they’re bad for you, in the long run. They made me need more and more of them, no matter how much it hurt me, or people around me. That’s what addiction means, that you keep wanting more of something, even when you _don’t_ want it. Am I making any sense to you?”

Jordan nodded, looking dazed. After a moment, they asked in a very small voice, “Are you a junkie?”

From the mouth of babes. Klaus blinked a couple of times to clear his stinging eyes. “What do you know about junkies?”

“There were a couple living in our building.” Jordan wrapped their arms tight around their knees. “They slept on the stairs one night, and Mom told me not to go near them. She told me that junkies are dangerous, that they take poison that makes them go crazy.”

Ben hadn’t said anything in a while, but now he reached out and silently stroked Jordan’s arm, in long, soothing motions. Klaus was grateful for his presence, though there was little Ben could do to mitigate the pain of the situation.

“I’d never hurt you,” Klaus told Jordan. “Not on purpose. And I’ll try my best not to do it by accident. But yes. I’m a junkie. Or was. I’m trying not to be.”

“Is that why you’re sick all the time? Because of the drugs?”

“Actually, I’m sick all the time when I _don’t_ take the drugs. That’s why it’s so hard to quit. I don’t want to take them, ever, and scare you like this. But I can’t promise not to. I can only promise to try.”

Jordan didn’t answer, just sat there curled in on themself, looking thoughtful.

“It’s not fair that you have to deal with this,” Klaus said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not like I have a choice. No one else can see me.” Jordan met his gaze, steady, searching. “I don’t think you’re dangerous. Anyway, I’m dead. It can’t get any worse.”

The tears Klaus had tried to hold back spilled down his cheeks.

As for Ben, he hugged the little ghost tightly from behind. “Hey,” he growled. “I’ll take care of you. And Klaus will do his best too, right, Klaus?”

“Absolutely,” Klaus assured them. He moved in closer and mustered up the strength to caress Jordan’s cheek. “I wish you could have better caretakers.”

“I’m glad I’ve got you,” Jordan said, and then glanced up at Ben. “Both of you. I was really lost before you came.”

That went in both directions, but Klaus knew better than to burden a child with that knowledge, on top of everything else. Instead they remained for a while all three, holding each other quietly.

In the end, it was Klaus’s stomach that broke the silence by rumbling.

“Well,” he said, standing up. “I guess I need to eat something.”

“Klaus?” Jordan called as Klaus got ready to cook up another packet of ramen. “How old were you, when you started seeing the ghosts?”

“I’ve seen them all my life. I don’t even remember the first one.”

“Couldn’t anyone help you?”

And what did you answer to _that_? Klaus’s memories raced from Dad locking him into the mausoleum, to Mom’s automatic smile as she encouraged him to make the most of his powers, to Pogo tutting in disapproval – at him or at his father, he was never sure – to his siblings, each striving for attention and love, powerless to aid each other with anything but the smallest gestures.

He’d be damned if he brought all of _that_ up too.

“No,” he said simply. “What do you say we go down to the ocean after dinner?”


	6. Chapter 6

Diego came pounding on the door the next morning.

“Five called me up to talk to you,” he said, stepping into the apartment. “Why don’t you get... Jesus, you live like this?”

Klaus looked around, at the bench with the heating pad, the cupboard without a door, the packing crate that served as both table and second cupboard, and the bed. Currently occupied by two ghosts who had up to recently been singing Camp Granada at the top of their lungs, but obviously Diego didn’t know that part.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“When was the last time you cleaned?”

“I’ve got a broom somewhere. Closet, I guess.”

“Bathroom,” Jordan filled in. “You didn’t want it to get your shoes dirty.”

“Bathroom. It’s not been on top of my to-do-list lately.”

Diego had already opened the door to the closet. “What the hell, Klaus? Do you spend _all_ your money on clothes?”

“Most of it is thrifted,” Klaus pointed out.

“You don’t even have a kitchen table, but you’ve got enough outfits for an Elton John tour. Your priorities are wack.” Next, Diego stuck his head into the bathroom, and went from grumbling to full-on ranting. “This is a freaking health hazard! There’s not even a shower in here!”

“That’s what the garden hose is for. We’re not all professional cleaners. What did Five say?”

“He wanted to talk to you. You’re the one who asked him to call you, or don’t you remember that part?”

“I do, yes. Okay. Can I come over to your place and call him?”

“Clean up this shit first or you’re not coming near my phone.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I am so not.” Diego grabbed the broom and shoved it at Klaus. “Ideally I’d have you disinfected too, but I’ll settle for a shower. At the gym. _After_ you’ve finished cleaning.”

At this, Ben leaned his chin in his hand and watched Klaus with such a shit-eating grin that Klaus was tempted to ram the broom right into his chest. Not that it would accomplish anything.

One brother ragging him about his habits he’d learned to tune out, but Diego was harder to ignore. Klaus cleaned. He had to do it all alone, too, since all Diego did was either stand around with his arms crossed, or point at things Klaus had missed.

Jordan did their part too. They seemed to consider this a great new game. “It’s not as messy as my room used to be, but the dust bunnies are a _lot_ bigger. They’re actually bunny sized. You could have them in a cage!”

“Very funny,” Klaus growled.

“I think you’re stressing him out,” Ben said. “You should sing something. Do you know the Mary Poppins song?”

“Do not...” Klaus started, but Jordan obediently started singing, and Ben filled in what Jordan forgot.

Normally, Klaus was all in favour of dame Julie Andrews, but there was such a thing as too much cheerfulness, especially when he was sweeping the floor in the midst of abstinence. “Oh, I _wish_ I had a spoonful of sugar right now!” he snapped.

Ben blanched, and Jordan looked up at him with a bewildered expression. They hadn’t understood the meaning, thank god. But Diego, too, frowned a bit harder than before.

“Just kidding,” Klaus hastened to amend. “I don’t want that. At all.”

“Are you okay?” Diego asked, genuine concern under the stern tone.

“Splendid. Never better. Are we done?”

“Bathroom too.”

“Fuck you!”

“Bad word!” Jordan exclaimed automatically.

“Yes, very bad word. I apologize. Bathroom it is.”

The advantage of having a bathroom that barely deserved the name was that it didn’t take long to clean, even with the level of dirt Klaus had let amass in the sink.

Once he was done, he washed his hands with more fervour than he had cleaned anything else so far, and gave Diego an exaggerated bow. “There. My lord. Are we finished?”

“Sure,” Diego said and headed for the door. “Wouldn’t hurt if you got your own phone though, instead of mooching off mine.”

“The only money I have is what’s left from the silverware,” Klaus said, grabbing his jacket from the bed. The ghosts followed along too, without any sign from him. It’d be awkward to have Jordan around while he talked to Five, but after yesterday’s relapse, they had been so clingy that he couldn’t bear to ask them to stay behind. “And that’s going to have to last me a while,” he continued. Unless you want me to go out and suck...”

Ben coughed very loudly.

“Bad word!” Klaus chastised himself. “Sorry!”

The look Diego gave him was odd in a new way.

“What?” Klaus asked.

“You haven’t talked to the lawyer, have you?”

“No. Why?” The potential meaning hit him as they headed down the stairs. “Wait, are you saying there’s money? I’m actually getting some money?”

“Maybe. Kind of.”

“What does _that_ mean?”

“Well, none of us are getting any money at all until all the affairs are sorted, and apparently that could take months. But yeah, you’re in the will. There were just... conditions. You had to stop using drugs and shit.”

“For how long? Like, if I don’t use drugs in a certain time I can have the money? Or if I do use drugs they take the money away?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“How can you not _remember_?” This was the single thing that could make or break all of Klaus’s future, and Diego acted like it was a minor detail. Klaus wanted to shake him – though that would only end in trouble, especially for him.

“There was a lot going on, okay? First you ran off, then there was the whole business with Five needing to be declared alive. We all said it’s him, but that wasn’t good enough, it had to go through the proper channels, and they’re setting up a DNA test, and all of that. Then there’s the fact that Luther got the house, but the house isn’t _there_ anymore, so basically it means he gets the land and the rubble that’s left.”

“Ouch,” Klaus muttered. A thought struck him. “Wait, did you tell them about the silverware?”

“No.” Diego sighed, and his jaw tightened. “I did tell them about Mom, though.”

“What did they say?”

“Five asked to see the pieces and wanted to know if the positronic circuitry was intact.”

“What’s that?”

Ben had been listening quietly so far, but now his eyes widened, and he told Klaus, “Memory and personality storage.”

“Her...” Diego swallowed hard. “Five wants to see if he can... rebuild her.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Klaus’s heart swelled at the thought, but Diego looked more miserable than ever.

“I already...” Struggling with the words, Diego shoved his hands in his pockets, and the scowl deepened. “Said goodbye to her... twice. I can’t... get my hopes up... again.”

“You’ve got to let him try, though!” Ben protested, even though Diego couldn’t hear him.

Klaus was inclined to agree, but he could understand Diego’s perspective too. He knew what it was like to keep waiting for someone you’d lost, to have your mourning torn up by the inconvenient appearance of hope.

Even so, how could you do anything else, when there was even the slightest chance of success?

“I think you should give Five the pieces,” he said.

Diego rubbed at his eyes. “I already have.”

* * *

In the end, while Ben and Jordan came along to the gym, Klaus did ask them to stay outside while he talked to Five. Jordan didn’t mind, instantly fascinated by the sparring match going on upstairs. Klaus, too, might have been tempted to remain and watch a pair of half-naked men pummel each other, but now he took the opportunity to have a conversation he didn’t need to censor for the sake of a child.

Diego remained in the room, sitting on the sofa and pretending to read _The Ring_ magazine while Klaus made the call.

He had expected Vanya to answer, but Five picked up on the second signal.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s Klaus.”

“Yes. Vanya said you wanted to speak to me.”

“Yeah, I... I’m sorry about bailing like that yesterday. The truth is, the room was crawling with ghosts. Uh, your ghosts.”

“That makes sense.”

There was no discernible emotion in Five’s voice, only a mild interest, as if Klaus had complained of the pollen level in the room. Well, he always had been a cold fish, even as a real kid.

“I can’t come see you in a while. It’s nothing against you, it’s just, I’m trying to stay sober, and I can’t do both.”

“I understand.”

Goddamnit, there had to be _some_ way of connecting. “I’m really sorry.”

Five gave a deep sigh. “Klaus, I know your powers and your feelings towards them, and I know my past. You don’t have to explain. I should have seen this coming. Although I must admit, I am surprised at their tenacity, seeing how most of them weren’t killed in this time. Then again, I do have a body count since arriving here as well.”

“Oh,” Klaus said, wishing the queasiness in his stomach would go away.

“I know what I am. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t regret it, either.”

“Hey, hey, no, no judgement,” Klaus said. “That’s not what this is. Hell, if my ghosts ever make it over from Vietnam, I’m pretty much screwed.” Apart from the one ghost he desperately wanted to come – but there was no use in dwelling on that again. 

“Did you have much problem with them while you were there?”

“You think I was sober for a single second in that place? That any of us were?”

He could still taste the mix of whiskey and amphetamines. There had been a lot of different drugs in the barracks, but marijuana smelled too much, and you could get into real trouble for using heroin. Amphetamines were handed out like candy. And a bitch once you got off the high – at least he’d had the sense and experience to never take out his gun while he was in that state. Not everyone in his troop had felt the same need for restraint. Some scenes stayed in his mind’s eye forever, no ghosts needed.

“God. No wonder we lost that war.”

“Yeah. At least you were trying to save the world, and all of us. I was fighting a war I knew to be bullshit so I could stay with a guy I liked.”

“We all need someone.”

Who do you need? Klaus wanted to ask, but it seemed too intimate somehow. He was surprised that Five admitted it. Klaus had denied it himself, for years, pretending to be free of all attachments, as if everything he needed could be pharmaceutically manufactured.

But even then, he’d had Ben. Needed him, even if he wouldn’t have said so out loud. Then there had been Dave, and _that_ need was every bit as hard to get over as the drugs.

He still needed Ben, and he suspected that he was starting to need Jordan too. And what about Diego? Watching the too-casual form of his brother on the sofa, he acknowledged that yes, he might need Diego, though he doubted the feeling was mutual.

“Are you still there?” Five asked.

“Yeah. Hey, what’s this about putting Mom back together?”

Diego’s back instantly tensed up, but he didn’t turn around.

“Maybe,” Five said with emphasis. “I’m not a robotics expert, but most of the positronic system seems to be intact, from what I can tell. In theory, you might be able to clean it up, place it in a new chassis, and bring her back without much data loss. But you’d have to actually _create_ the new chassis first. She’s a complex machine, it’s not like you can just plug her into a home computer.”

“Do you know anyone who could do that?”

“I’ve been back for less than three weeks. The only people I know in this time are you guys, and assassins looking to kill me.”

“Good point.”

“I don’t suppose Dad ever talked to you about how she was built in the first place?”

“During what, our long and heartfelt conversations? No.”

“And that goes for all of us, Luther included. The best we can hope for is that there’s a mention of it in his papers, and that those specific papers conveniently weren’t in the academy when it went down. Unless you want to take one for the team and chat up the old man.”

“That would be a huge no.”

“I figured. For now, I’m just holding onto the pieces until we find someone with the skills to rebuild her, either through Dad’s papers or just by sheer luck.”

“Seems like a long shot.”

“We’re young. Technology progresses. It could happen. How’s Diego?”

“Mopey,” Klaus said, watching his brother’s back.

“I’m sure you’ll snap him out of it. Say hi to Ben for me, will you?”

“Sure.”

Hanging up, Klaus felt puzzled. Five had sounded as if Klaus was the one looking after Diego, rather than vice versa.

“You done?” Diego asked, closing his magazine.

“Yeah, I... uh... I still need to call that lawyer, set up an appointment.”

“Of course.”

“Hey, how about when you’re done working, you come hang out with us for a while? We could go to the park.”

Diego’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief, but only for a second, before he nodded. “Sounds good.”

* * *

For the second time, Klaus stepped into the snazzy, glass-front building where his father’s lawyers had their offices. This time he opted for the elevator, and stood in uncomfortable silence with Ben, Jordan, and two people in tailored suits who were very carefully not giving him sideways glances.

Even Jordan was quiet, face pinched and nervous. As soon as they left the elevator and were out of sight of the suit people, Klaus reached out and gave their hand a quick squeeze. Whether the reassurance was for Jordan or himself, he didn’t know.

He was shown into a smaller office than last time, but it had the advantage of being empty, apart from a desk the size of a pool table, two visitor’s chairs on one side of it, and the elderly lawyer, Mr. Galsworthy, on the other.

“Do take a seat, Mr. Hargreeves.”

Klaus sat down in one of the chairs, and Ben in the other, with Jordan on the armrest.

“Let’s see, you left before we got started the other day,” Mr. Galsworthy said, shuffling some papers around.

“Yeah, sorry about that. Too many ghosts.”

Mr. Galsworthy gave him a disapproving look over his glasses, and Klaus pointed at himself.

“The Séance. Medium.”

“Ah yes. Never put much faith in all that, myself.”

“Well, you’re WRONG,” Jordan said, sticking out their tongue and crossing their eyes.

Klaus smirked. “Then I suppose you don’t want to know what your dead clients are saying of you?”

He had the satisfaction of seeing Mr. Galsworthy balk.

“Klaus,” Ben warned, though there was no real heat in it. People doubting Klaus’ powers was frustrating for him too.

Klaus let the lawyer sweat for a moment and then admitted, “Kidding! No ghosts here except my own. Bit surprising, really, in a lawyer’s office. This place must be new.”

“The firm is from 1932,” Mr. Galsworthy said, looking as though he objected to his own words. “However, we moved into this building in 2014.”

“That explains it, then. All the angry ghosts must be left in the old place.”

“I’m here,” Jordan pointed out.

“You angry, darling?” Klaus asked with a smile, his eyes still on Mr. Galsworthy.

“No. Are you gonna get any money?”

Mr. Galsworthy coughed. “If we could get down to business.”

“Of course.” Klaus crossed his legs and spread his hands. “So what’s the word from dear old Dad? Luther gets the academy, yeah? Is it worth anything, now that the building’s a pile of rubble?”

“Central real estate in this city is very profitable. Of course, in this case it may take some time for it to turn a profit, since the ground needs to be cleared up and new buildings erected.”

“See, when you say words like ‘erected’, it just gets me off track,” Klaus said. “What about the rest of us? We got some money, yeah? Diego said something about me needing to get off the drugs.”

“That’s right.” Although Mr. Galsworthy’s voice was still calm, red spots had appeared on his cheeks. “The liquid assets are divided equally between Reginald Hargreeves’ surviving children. That means six shares, if Mr. Five Hargreeves” - he scowled at that name - “can establish his identity. In your case, there are some special conditions.”

“What are liquid assets?” Jordan asked. “Like lakes and stuff?”

“Money,” Ben said. “And stocks. Things like that.”

Klaus did his best to ignore them. “What special conditions?”

“Your share of the money is to be put in a trust fund, from which you can withdraw a maximum of 0.1 percent of the inherited sum monthly. In order to withdraw the money, you must first pass a drug test. Any month that the test shows signs of drug or alcohol use, the money will be forfeited and given to the city hospital.”

“Bully for the hospital,” said Klaus. Dad clearly hadn’t trusted him one bit, which, okay, was probably warranted. “So in order to get my full inheritance, I have to stay sober and _alive_ for, like, a hundred more years?”

“Eighty-three,” said Ben.

“Anything else?”

“There is a note from your father that... oh yes. ‘Erratic behavior is not in itself to be seen as a sign of drug use, as it may result from Number Four’s powers or” - Mr. Galsworthy coughed - “obnoxious personality.’”

“Good old Dad.” Klaus sighed. “So how much money are we talking about?”

“Your father’s affairs are not yet in order. Considering the state of his non-liquid assets, it’s impossible at this stage to calculate a correct sum.”

“Listen, I’ve got rent to pay. Just give me a ballpark figure so I know what I’m dealing with. Is it ten bucks a month, or a thousand?”

There was a second’s pause when Mr. Galsworthy just stared at him, before answering, “No. Not at all. In fact, at a guess, it would be closer to a net sum of 75,000 dollars.”

“That is a _lot_ of money,” Jordan said.

Klaus’s brain stood still, and he tried to prod it back into action. “Wait. The 0.1 percent is 75,000 dollars? So that means the total is 75...”

“Million dollars. Yes. I can’t emphasize enough that this is a guess.”

The last part of Mr. Galsworthy’s statement was almost drowned out by Jordan’s shriek of “million!” and Ben’s ensuing laughter.

“Holy shit” Klaus whispered to himself, glad to already be sitting down. “When... when can I collect the first check?”

Of course, he’d have to pass the drug test first. That wasn’t happening at the moment.

“I would say, in a few months.”

Well, fuck. Those $75,000 a month wouldn’t do him any good if he couldn’t survive for long enough to get his hands on them.

“Any chance of an advance?”

“I’m afraid not. You could apply for a bank loan with your inheritance as security, but considering the terms of the will, they may not be willing to take the risk.”

“Right.” So close, and so far away.

Ben chewed his lip, looking troubled, and Jordan, catching the change in mood even if they didn’t fully understand the reason for it, sat back down on the armrest after their previous joyful dance.

“If I may make a suggestion,” Mr. Galsworthy said, “the other members of your family may have a greater chance at getting such a bank loan. You could talk to one of them, ask them to help you out.”

So it was back to begging from the sibs. Well, he’d done it before; he wasn’t too proud to do it again.

* * *

“You want me to give you money,” Diego said flatly.

They were sitting on a park bench, watching Jordan climb all the tallest trees. At least that was what Klaus and Ben were doing; Diego was just tagging along.

“Loan me money,” Klaus corrected him. “I’ll pay you back, once I get the first 0.1 percent.”

Diego pursed his lips, looking doubtful.

“Come on! I’m bound to pass a drug test sooner or later.”

“Not if you OD first,” Ben said.

“Not helping,” Klaus muttered, and continued to Diego, “I promise I’ll pay you back. If you don’t trust me, maybe you could pay my rent instead? It would really help.”

“Can’t you just get a job for a few months?”

“And put what on my resumé? Former superhero, drug addict, Vietnam vet, petty thief, will suck your cock for a place to stay? That’ll go down well.”

Diego scowled, but didn’t reply.

“Just do it, Diego,” Ben said. “At least he’s trying.”

Klaus didn’t repeat the words, just gave Diego his best large-eyed pout and whined quietly.

“You are way too old to make puppy dog noises,” Diego snapped. “I’ll tell you what I’ll pay for. Rehab.”

At that, Ben perked up and crossed his arms, giving Klaus a shit-eating grin.

Klaus groaned and buried his head in his hands.

“It would give you a place to stay until your money comes in,” Diego continued, “and keep you off the drugs in the meantime. Think of it as protecting my investment.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” Klaus said, lifting his face enough to speak, as he rubbed at his eyes. “But it doesn’t work. I’ve done it before.”

“Court mandated,” Ben said. “You’re actually motivated this time. Could make a difference.”

“You didn’t have anything to come back to, before,” Diego said.

“I don’t need both of you ganging up on me!” Klaus snapped.

“Maybe that’s what you _do_ need,” Diego said. He leaned forward. “Listen, I don’t know what Ben’s telling you, but I know what he’s like, so I can guess. Maybe one brother trying to help you out wasn’t enough, so let’s make it two. Hell, I’ll make it six if I have to.”

“Diego...”

“And then there’s that little ghost of yours. What has it been, a week?”

“Nine days.”

“Nine days, reading parenting books, and going to playgrounds, and showing more responsibility than I’ve seen in you, ever. You don’t want to do everything in your power to give Jordan a solid father figure?”

“I’m not a father figure! That’s ridiculous. And what am I supposed to do, just bring them along to rehab?”

“Why not? Who’d be the wiser?”

Klaus looked from one brother to the other. Diego, trying for the stern hardass expression but with the genuine concern too obvious on his face. And Ben, who just looked so damned hopeful it was heartbreaking.

“What kind of environment is that for a kid? They’d be scared, or bored stiff, or...”

“I’d be there too,” Ben pointed out. “I could take them out on day trips, to playgrounds, or movies. Keep them occupied during the worst confessions. Listen, Klaus, I know you hate those places, but it’d give you a respite. You’d be away from the drugs, and you wouldn’t have to worry about money. Do you really think you’ll do better out here, than with a team of professionals helping out?”

Klaus sighed. His eyes drifted to the top of a high pine tree, where a little figure stood on a branch that could never have held a living person, and turned to wave at him. He waved back.

“All right,” he said. “But none of the religious facilities. I’m not giving God the pleasure.”


	7. Chapter 7

It took a few more days to set up the arrangement, but once Klaus took the tour of the rehab that would be his home for the next 90 days, he had to admit that Diego had made a good choice. It was a nice three-story house in faux old colonial style, a mile away from everything, a great deal fancier than any place Klaus had been to before, and probably a great deal more expensive too. Yeah, the remote location meant Ben and Jordan would have to work harder to make good of those plans to go see movies during the stay, but on the other hand the surrounding wood was better than a playground.

The interior was as perky and wholesome as could be expected, but at least there weren’t any encouraging mottos on the walls, or sentimental pictures of Jesus. Most importantly, Klaus had never been here before. Fresh start, no preconceptions.

Of course, the schtick the therapists told you upon arrival was pretty much the same wherever you went. This one, Dr. McKenna, was a middle-aged woman with bright red glasses and a crocheted cardigan that suggested that if it had been a safe enough environment for long wooden bead necklaces, she would have worn some.

Klaus nodded along without really listening. He figured that Jordan could always give him the details if there were any he’d missed – as the only one of the tree who hadn’t heard this stuff before, they were actually paying attention.

The small but single-user bedroom he was shown to had recently been repainted, which suggested some recent goings-on, but whatever had happened, it didn’t seem to be lethal, because the room was unoccupied. Klaus threw himself on the bed and nodded thoughtfully.

“Okay, then.”

Dr. McKenna finished up her speech and asked, “Do you have any questions?”

“What’s antabuse?” said Jordan, sitting down on the window sill. “Is it being mean to ants?”

Klaus laughed. “No. It’s... Never mind. It doesn’t apply.”

“Pardon?” Dr. McKenna frowned.

“Oh. See, here’s the thing about me. Sometimes I come off as talking to myself, when I’m not actually talking to myself.”

“You speak to the dead. I know.” With a shy smile, Dr. McKenna admitted, “I’m a great fan of your sister’s.”

After what had happened with Harold Jenkins, ‘fan of your sister’s’ wasn’t very reassuring, but Klaus doubted this one would turn out to be a vindictive stalker. Plus, he owed it to Diego to at least try to play nice.

And so he gave her his best smile and said, “I’ll try to get you an autograph.”

That actually was the main difference, he found – staff were gentler with you when you were signed in by your superhero brother, instead of a prison guard. As for the residents, they had their own problems and didn’t have time to give him any grief. The mood got downright cosy.

At least until a few hours later, when Jordan returned after an excursion of their own looking dejected and a little troubled.

“Hey, sport, what’s up?” Ben asked.

“There’s a dead guy in the music room.”

Klaus closed the book he’d been reading. “Dead as in ghost, or as in corpse?”

“Why would there be a _corpse_ in the music room?”

“You never know. Did he scare you?”

“I don’t know.” Jordan’s hands were clenched into fists. “I didn’t like him. He said he was gonna open me.”

That got both brothers on their feet instantly, and they marched into the music room, where a tall, stringy ghost was pacing back and forth, muttering incessantly.

Klaus didn’t know if it was possible for Ben to feel the same red-hot rage a living person could, but whatever he _did_ feel, it was enough to sock the guy straight in the jaw.

For a split second, the guy looked stunned, then he lunged at Ben, who squared up for a fight.

Tentacles seemed imminent, and that would help exactly zero percent, so Klaus stepped in between, charging up enough power to shove the two apart.

“Okay, time out,” he said. “You. I don’t know what you think you’re up to, but you do not threaten the kid. Ever.”

The stranger shook his head. Even in death, his teeth were still grinding. “I’m on such a bad trip, man. I asked the little brat to call 911, he wouldn’t do it.”

“You’re dead! You’ve only got one trip left to make, and as far as I’m concerned, you can go right now. I’ll help you pack up the emotional baggage and get out of here.”

“No no no no no,” the guy said, starting to pace the room again. “You’re not here. I need to get off it. It has to pass soon. I should find a phone. I have to find a phone. I found one, but it didn’t work.”

“ _You_ didn’t work,” Ben said. “We can’t use phones.” That got him no response, and he gave Klaus a shrug. “Is he still high? Is that even possible when you’re dead?”

“I don’t think he had enough brain left when he died to make sense of something like this,” Klaus said.

Ben sighed and lifted Jordan into his arms. The little ghost clung to him tightly.

“We’ll just stay away from the music room for now,” Ben said and patted Jordan’s hair. “If you want to hear music, Klaus will bring some instruments into our room, okay?”

“What if he comes after us?”

Ben’s eyes met Klaus’s. “We won’t let that happen.”

That was easier said than done. With the other two leaving the room, it was up to Klaus to try to settle this mess.

It had been years since he last attempted an exorcism, and there never had been a surefire technique even before he got into drugs, but it was the only solution he could think of, and so he kicked off his shoes and sat down on the piano stool.

“Hey! Hey, you! You want to learn a new meditation technique? Might help get you through this.”

The ghost stopped muttering and gave him a bewildered look.

“Sit down,” Klaus continued. “Legs crossed, like this.”

The ghost did as told. It took some time – his were long legs, and coordination wasn’t his strong suit. But eventually he was all pretzeled up on the floor.

“Imagine yourself in a place you like. A calm, peaceful place. Then say after me: Release this spirit. Cleanse this soul and lift it up. Deliver it from every evil, every sorrow and pain, and bid it eternal rest.”

As rituals went, this was a fairly makeshift one, but it had the advantage of an actual success rate of two, which was two more than most of his other routines. Granted, both cases had been gentle, religious old ghosts who had taken pity on the trembling little medium. None of that applied here.

Still, the ghost seemed less agitated. That was a start.

“Someone is calling to you. You hear the sound of a bicycle bell.”

“Bicycle bell?”

“Trust me on this one. You’re going towards it.”

After fifteen minutes more of soothing pep talk mixed with hints to just pass on already, Klaus’s legs were cramped and his head was heavy. The ghost however remained, no wispier than he had been before.

Klaus gave up and rose unsteadily, legs full of pins and needles.

“Thanks, man,” the ghost told him. “I feel better.”

“Great. Just... stay in the music room and practice. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

There were really three potential outcomes. Either the ghost managed the exorcism on his own, an unlikely but appealing option. Or he would keep meditating and lose track of time the way ghosts sometimes did when they were alone. Or, worst option by far, he’d soon get back into ranting and threatening kids mode.

Klaus hoped it would take a long time for that to happen; enough for him to build up his strength before giving the exorcism another shot.

* * *

Six days into the stay, Diego came to visit, looking a bit more cleaned up than usual, with a black blazer instead of his usual jacket. He was permitted into the garden, where they could have a conversation without being overheard, but staff could still be certain that no drugs were smuggled in. Ben and Jordan had followed along too, sitting down next to them on the garden bench.

“How are you holding up?” Diego asked.

“Good. Peachy keen.”

“You’re still really sick,” Jordan pointed out.

“Let’s not get into the details of my bathroom habits, okay? Detox is what it is, and what it is, is gross. But I haven’t run away, or used any forbidden goods, or even asked people to provide me with some. I have been a good little resident, attended all the sanctimonious lectures, eaten the wholesome food, read ghost stories to Jordan, and if I sometimes feel like that guy with a rat in his heart, that’s part of the deal.”

“I’m glad,” Diego said. “Not about the heart rat thing. But that the program is working.”

“So far. What about you? What news from the outside world?”

“I’m good.” He sighed. “We found Pogo.”

“Oh.” Why should that hurt so much? Pogo had been dead for weeks, having a body made no difference.

“We’re having a funeral today. Well, me and Luther and Five. Vanya thought it was better if she didn’t come, seeing how she was the one who killed him and all. And Alison’s got business she needs to sort out in LA. Apparently going mute was a breach of contract. Which seems pretty heartless, but I guess that’s Hollywood. Anyway, you want to come?”

“I’m only a week in,” Klaus said. “I doubt they’d let me.”

“They will. I asked. I told them our uncle had died. Figured that would go down better than ‘genetically altered chimp’. They said they don’t recommend it, but if you really want to and I keep supervision, you can go.”

“I can’t, though. Me and Five in the same place, while I’m still sobering up? It’s too much. I’m sorry.” And he was – but it was also a relief to have an excuse. Funerals were a grueling affair, especially when you cared about the person being put into the ground.

“I’ll go,” Ben said.

Klaus blinked. “Are you sure?”

“He’s my family too. And if he’s still around, somebody should be there to take care of him.”

“I want to go!” Jordan said and bounced to their feet. “I’ve never seen a generic whatsitcalled chimp before!”

Ben opened his mouth to say what seemed to be yes, but Klaus shook his head. If Five’s ghosts were a lot for him to take, they were definitely not child-friendly company.

So instead, Ben said, “Better not. You stay here and take care of Klaus, okay? I promise to bring back Pogo’s ghost if it’s there.”

Jordan pouted, but sat back down.

“Ben wants to come,” Klaus told Diego.

“Really?” Diego’s eyes searched for Ben, without quite finding him. “Thanks, Ben. It’d mean a lot, having you there.”

Ben’s smile was sad. “Of course.”

After Diego and Ben had left, Klaus and Jordan went back inside. There was a talent show on in the TV room, and the two of them sat down to watch and, in Klaus’s case, sample the snacks.

Soon, his thoughts drifted back to the funeral. He felt a bit guilty about not going, and guiltier still by the fact that he didn’t even particularly want to go. Pogo would be equally dead whether he was there to say farewell or not. If there was a ghost to collect, Ben would see to it.

In truth, not wanting to face a bunch of brutally murdered ghosts was only part of it. It was the whole outside world he couldn’t face.

On his previous tours in rehab, all he could think of was getting back to his old habits, start using again so he didn’t have to feel like shit anymore.

Now, he was stuck for 90 days, longer than ever before, and he wouldn’t budge even when he had the opportunity. The mission had changed, from avoiding the pain to making it through, if that was even possible. For Jordan, and Ben, and improving his powers enough to get rid of the ghost in the music room and others like him, and the glimmer of vain hope that he could never quite quench, to maybe see Dave again.

And okay. Sure. As little as he wanted to give Dad the satisfaction, those 75,000 dollars a month was a motivating factor too.

Not having to worry about food and shelter was pretty good too, and Ben’s nagging was down to a minimum. Even Jordan seemed to have taken to the place, music room ghost aside. Which maybe wasn’t so strange – it was definitely a step up from Klaus’s apartment, and they didn’t have to worry that he’d start using again.

Klaus could have stayed in front of the TV all day, just relaxing, but Jordan got antsy after a while. Whether it was because they were a ghost, or a seven-year-old, they didn’t have a good sense of time, and started asking, “When’s Ben coming back?”

“Not for a while yet.”

Ten minutes later: “What about now?”

“No.”

Probably it was the allure of meeting a chimp that made waiting hard. Jordan asked several times more, while they got out for a walk, and Klaus was having dinner, and when they got back to their own room.

They got a bit more quiet during storytime, fascinated by the villain’s gruesome plan of performing surgery on cows to make them look like unicorns. Klaus, on his part, was starting to feel sick, and it wasn’t all from withdrawal. The details were far too easy to imagine.

He was pretty relieved when Ben returned, though the fact that he came alone made Jordan’s face drop.

“Sorry, sport, no ghost. And a closed casket, so you didn’t miss anything.”

Jordan made a small disgruntled noise and sat back with their arms crossed.

“I guess he’s at peace, then,” Klaus said, not sure how to feel about that.

“Guess so,” Ben said softly. “I said goodbye anyway. Just in case.”

“Goodbye, Pogo!” Klaus said, aiming his words in the general direction of the otherworld. Despite the twinge in his heart, he kept a smile on his lips. “Thanks for the good times! There weren’t many, but hey, you did your best. That’s all any of us can do.”

Ben put his hand on Klaus’s arm, a light, tingling touch through the shirt. “Yeah.”

* * *

Klaus hadn’t exactly expected childcare to be easy, even with the books to help him, but most of the time, Jordan was such a joy to be around that the times when they weren’t always blindsided him.

He didn’t have a lot of rules. Mealtime and bedtime weren’t factors. Doing crazy stunts that would have killed a living kid was... well, sometimes you just had to say, “Ben, could you take it from here?” and step inside when the sight of a tiny figure walking the ridge of a three-storey building made your stomach flip. And while he did try to get some school lessons in, if Jordan wasn’t in the mood, Klaus sure as hell wasn’t going to force them.

But there were still some things that were decidedly child-unfriendly, even for a dead child, and some of the stuff grown men watched on TV were among them. The porn Jordan shied away from on their own accord. The gore, not so much.

“Uh-uh,” Klaus said one late night, getting a glimpse of the TV screen. “You’re not watching that.”

“Absolutely not,” Ben concurred, stepping in front of the set.

“Oh, come on!” Jordan protested. “It’s funny! Look, her skin has come off, and now her skull’s spinning round and round!”

“Yeah. I saw. It’s not for kids. Time to leave.”

“I’ve seen worse than that for real. I _am_ worse than that for real.”

“I don’t care. You’re still a kid, and I’m saying no.”

They scowled at him. “You can’t stop me.”

“Maybe not, but Ben can.”

“Sure can,” Ben agreed.

One of the residents called out, “Hey, looney tunes, mind stepping outside with your yammering?”

Klaus gave an exaggerated bow in apology and nodded at Ben, who briskly grabbed Jordan and carried them outside.

Jordan gave one of those patented hell screams and kicked at Ben, to no avail.

“I _hate_ you!” Jordan shrieked. “You’re not my real dads!”

Both brothers stopped short, staring wide-eyed at each other. Jordan took advantage of the drop in vigilance to bury their teeth in Ben’s arm, growling them especially long for the occasion.

Ben automatically let go, and Jordan slipped away, not back to the TV room, but through the wall outside.

“Now where did they get off to?” Ben complained and stuck his head through for a second. Bringing it back inside, he shook it. “Too damn quick. I should go look for them.”

“Let them cool off first,” Klaus said. “Better that way.”

“I guess.” The grimace Ben made was almost helpless. “Never thought I’d be on the receiving end of that one.”

“We’re not like him,” Klaus said, trying to sound decisive, though he ruined it by adding, “Are we?”

“Well, I wasn’t planning to lock Jordan in the cellar as punishment for talking back at us. Were you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then no.”

Subdued, they both hung around for a while, waiting to see if Jordan came back, and then Ben went out to search, while Klaus, with his curfew, was constricted to go back to their room.

Jordan returned before Ben did, looking smaller than usual, utterly dejected, and gory enough to give weight to their argument before.

“Hi, honey,” Klaus said gently. “Have you forgiven us?”

“I guess,” Jordan said in a small voice, sitting down on the bed.

Klaus sat down next to them and stroked their arm. “I know you’ve been through a lot. More than any kid should. It’s horrible, and unfair, and I can’t do anything about it, as much as I wish I could. But there are still things I want to spare you. Even if it’s just stupid splatter movies on TV.”

Maybe it was overcompensation for all the kids he _hadn’t_ been able to help. Himself, for a start. His siblings. More civilians than he liked to remember.

Even if that was it, it didn’t change his stance on the matter.

Jordan folded their hands in their lap and looked down. “Mom would never mind what I watched. She said it’s all fake anyway.”

“It is fake, but I still mind. Sorry. I know I’m not your mom, but my house, my rules.”

“But it’s not your house,” Jordan said. Some of their usual cheeky tone was returning. “It’s the rehab’s house. And they’re okay with people watching that movie.”

“People, yes. Kids, no. They don’t know you’re here, remember? They think it’s all just adults.”

“So you’re the one breaking the rules by having me here!”

Klaus couldn’t help laughing. “I guess.”

Jordan laughed too, only to grow instantly serious a beat later. “I miss her.”

“I know you do.”

“And my siblings, and cousins, and all my friends.”

“I know. Do you want to go visit them? Ben can take you, even if I can’t.”

Jordan shook their head fiercely. “It’s creepy, going there, when no one can see me. It’s not the same. It’ll _never_ be the same.”

“No,” Klaus admitted, summoning the power to reach out and hug Jordan. “It won’t. And it’s okay to feel angry, and sad, and lost. And you’ll probably get angry with us lots and lots of times. We’re all still getting used to each other.”

“Klaus?”

“Yes, darling?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Well, that’s good,” Klaus said, kissing that electric ghost hair. “Because I don’t hate you either. Quite the opposite.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, until Ben materialized in the room. Seeing them, the worry and fear melted from his features.

“Oh, there you are!”

“Ben!” Jordan reached out with both hands, and Ben knelt by the bed, taking them in both of his.

“I’m here. I’ve got you.”

“I’m sorry I bit you!”

Ben smiled. “You didn’t hurt me. Just startled me a little. And I’m sorry I dragged you out like that. What do you say we let bygones be bygones?”

Jordan slid down from the bed and threw their arms around Ben’s neck. Ben looked up at Klaus, who grinned.

“Definitely not like dad,” he said.

* * *

Klaus kept strict count of the days. It was really the only way to make sure, as otherwise they tended to blend into each other. The routine was much the same every day, though some events were scheduled weekly.

Diego called weekly too, every Saturday afternoon, though the exact time could vary. Vanya called a few times, but not with any regularity. Five called exactly once, to say he had found a robotics expert who seemed promising. He did also inquire after Klaus’s health, though it seemed to be mostly perfunctory.

Allison sent a letter from LA, full of well-wishes but with very few facts about her life, though she let slip that Luther had now moved down to join her. Klaus wondered if that meant the two of them had rekindled their teenage romance, and decided he didn’t want to know.

On day fifty-nine, he actually managed to vanquish the music room ghost. Klaus hoped that wherever he went, he was happier than he’d been on earth.

On day sixty-two, Klaus terrified the cook by accidentally making Ben and Jordan so solid other people could see them. It probably didn’t help that Jordan was in a bad mood and had reverted back to their original appearance.

On day sixty-three, a meeting was called, and the staff informed Klaus that all manifestations of ghosts must be limited to his own room henceforth, or he’d be banned from the program.

Klaus agreed. All in all, it could have been worse. Ben could have had his tentacles out.

And testing the strength of his powers in his room was kind of fun. He could keep the ghosts solid for much longer now, and much more effectively. Ben had been able to move things around for a while, and Jordan was learning to as well.

They had long since finished _The Beasts of Clawstone Castle_ and returned it by post to the library, asking also for an extension for _The Marvelous Land of Oz._ Now they neared the ending of that book too, and Jordan kept trying to turn the page, to hasten the reading, though they hadn’t quite mastered the trick yet.

Jordan’s eyes shone with nervous excitement as the boy Tip turned into Princess Ozma, but sounded almost scared when they asked Klaus afterwards: “Do you think it’s true what Glinda said? That you should have your proper form and transformations are dishonest?”

“I think this book was written a hundred years ago,” Klaus said promptly. “And it’s fantastic that it has a boy who’s also a princess, but you don’t have to be one or the other. You _especially_ don’t have to be what people say you were born to be.”

Jordan beamed with pleasure at that, and readily agreed when the others suggested a math lesson next.

On day seventy-one, Diego showed up.

“Here in person!” Klaus declared upon seeing him. “And it’s not even Saturday. What brings us this honour?”

“The money came in,” Diego said. “Or, ours did. You still have to pass the test for yours, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Provided you’ve stuck with the program.”

“I’ve stuck with it,” Klaus said. “In fact, I need to keep sticking with it for nineteen more days, so what’s the hurry?”

“I’m buying an apartment. I figured I might get you one too. Or a house, if you’d rather.”

“Oh, definitely an apartment. Big city boy, that’s me. Of course, if you could get me a penthouse, that’d be the dream. I’ll pay you back, of course.”

“I’ve got 80 million,” Diego said with a smirk. “If you don’t pay me back, I think I’ll survive.”

“80? That’s more than the estimate, isn’t it?”

“Bit more, yeah. I think Galsworthy was being overly cautious.”

“Well, I may only have 0.1 percent a month of that, but it’s still more than enough to set up a payment plan.”

“Fine,” Diego said, sounding exasperated though there was a smile flickering at the edge of his mouth. “Anything else?”

Klaus pondered that. “Why don’t we continue this conversation in my room? Make it a group discussion.”

He was trusted enough by now that Diego was allowed in the bedroom after Klaus had dropped a hint about ghosts to the orderly.

Not that said ghosts were actually there.

“Pardon me,” Klaus said, and stepped into the corridor, where he called, “Ben! Jordan!”

There were a few assorted shouts of, “Shut _up_ , Hargreeves!” but Ben and Jordan also appeared.

“Group session in my room,” Klaus declared, leading them in and solidifying them in the process. “Apartment planning. Got any wishes for the dream home?”

Jordan lit up. “Can I have a bunk bed?”

“Don’t see why not. Ben, do you...”

But Ben wasn’t listening. He’d caught Diego in a bear hug.

After a solid minute or so, Diego let go and laughed through the tears. “Damn, you’re almost human!”

Ben laughed too. “Wow, thanks,” he said with mild sarcasm.

“You know what I mean.” Diego turned to Klaus. “You’re getting good at this.”

“No drugs for months,” Klaus pointed out, spreading his arms like an emcee. “I haven’t been this sober since puberty. Now, we have a wish for a bunk bed.”

“With a slide!” Jordan exclaimed.

“You’re good at this! Walk-in closet is a given. Don’t worry about filling it, I’ll do that myself. No offense, but I wouldn’t trust your taste in clothes anyway.”

Diego rolled his eyes. “How could I possibly take offense at that?”

“Ben, you have any wishes?”

“A library?”

“A library it is. And then there’s the living room. Cosy little space to watch TV, and bigger space to party.”

Diego cleared his throat.

“Party as in dance,” Klaus continued without missing a beat. “Eat good food. Stuff non-addicts do for fun. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Or maybe not. How often do you have fun?”

“Anything else?” Diego asked, ignoring the barb.

Klaus gestured vaguely. “Bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, all the usual stuff. I’ll figure out the details once I get there. And thank you so much for wanting to help out. You’re a doll.”

He took Diego’s face in both hands and kissed him on the forehead. Diego scowled, but didn’t move, and so Klaus patted him gently on the head.

“Grrrrrruff as a bulldog on the outside, soft as pudding on the inside,” he declared. “Bless you, brother.”

“Don’t make me regret doing this.”

Klaus smiled. “Oh, you wouldn’t. Pudding.”


	8. Chapter 8

The apartment building had the kind of uniformed doorman who would usually have thrown Klaus out on his heinie, but this one must have been forewarned, because he only gave them a tight smile and wished them good morning.

Jordan had been wiggling in delight ever since they first drove into the neighborhood, and the large glass elevator made them outright squeal. “Ooh, there are so many floors! Are we going all the way up?”

“That’s what penthouse means,” Ben said.

“I can’t wait!”

Since the elevator was transparent, Klaus thought it best to keep the ghosts invisible, and Jordan poked their head out at different angles to look around. By floor 30, they were leaning so far out the window that Ben had to haul them back in to prevent them from floating away entirely.

“Careful, you’ll fall.”

Jordan lit up. “Can we do that later? I’ve never fallen off a skyscraper before!”

“No!” both Klaus and Ben yelled at once. Diego, not party to the conversation, raised his eyebrows.

“It’s not like it would hurt me any,” Jordan muttered.

Klaus leaned back against the wall and groaned. “You’re going to give me a heart attack someday, kid.”

“Then we’d all be ghosts! That’d be fun!”

“No,” Ben said in a grim tone that he’d used on many occasions when a doped-up Klaus had offered similar sentiments.

Well, dying didn’t seem like such an enticing option anymore. Klaus merely rolled his eyes. “Then who’d make you solid when you want to touch things?”

“Meh!”

Once they stepped into the penthouse, all conversation stopped, in awe. The place was only half furnished, but the ceiling was high, sunlight streamed in through the one wall that was mostly windows, at one end of the room there was a twelve-piece lounge suite, and at the other there was a stereo with massive loudspeakers.

Ben reached out a hand to Klaus, who took it absent-mindedly, offering the other one to Jordan to make them both solid enough to explore everything physically.

Even in this infant stage of decoration, there was a sense of home already. Klaus drew a deep breath to take in the scent. “If I didn’t know any better, I would say that you’ve been baking.”

“Shit,” Diego said, squirming a little. “Listen, I didn’t mean to spring it on you like this. I told her to wait downstairs, let you get used to the apartment first, but I guess she got too excited.”

“She who?”

“Mom.”

Klaus felt like someone had punched him in the chest. Ben, who had been on his way to the next room, stopped short and turned around slowly, wide-eyed.

“She’s back?” Klaus asked, still trying to find his breath.

“Kind of. That guy Five found, he made her a provisional chassis. It’s pretty rudimentary, I didn’t want you to think that because she doesn’t look... She’s still in there. It’s still _her_.”

Smell of cookies meant kitchen. Kitchen was probably that door at the end of the room, past the stereo.

Klaus may have been sprinting to get there. He had no idea how the others did, but somehow they were all standing in the kitchen next, watching an android arrange the newly baked chocolate chip cookies on a plate.

The face was blank and empty like a doll’s, the hair obviously synthetic. The arms, although more advanced than the rest, with moveable joints everywhere they should be, were unpainted metal. The lower half was just a steel cage on little wheels, like a cross between a crinoline and a baggage cart.

She was also wearing a frilly apron, and humming a little song, though she stopped when she saw them.

“Klaus!” she said. There was no change in the face, not even a movement of the lips, and the voice was as politely blank as a screen reader. “How wonderful to see you! You look well.”

“Hi, mom.” His mouth was dry, he licked his lips. “You look... you’re alive.”

“In a manner of speaking. Pardon me for not being dressed. I have been so very busy. Have a cookie.”

Klaus had a cookie, and teared up from the host of memories that flooded his mind. They tasted exactly the same.

“Mom,” Ben said, and when that got no response, he stepped closer. “Mom!”

Still nothing. Once again, he held out his hand for Klaus to take, which he did, without much hope it would change things.

“Mom,” Klaus asked, “Can you see Ben?”

“Ben died.” Her new head wouldn’t move in all the ways the old one did, but she tilted it slightly to the side, in an approximation of a familiar old gesture.

“Yes, but he’s here. I can see him.”

“You were always so clever with that. Tell him hello.”

“Hello, mom,” Ben said softly.

Jordan had been staring at Mom in silent admiration, but now they piped up. “Why can’t she see us? I thought you’d made us visible!”

“I did. But I guess androids can’t see ghosts.”

“Aw. Well, can you tell her hello from me too? And that she’s really, _really_ cool?”

Klaus smiled at Mom. It was so eerie, not getting a smile back. She’d always been smiling. “Ben says hello, and, uh, I’ve got a second little ghost here, called Jordan, who thinks you’re cool.”

“Really, _really_ cool!” Jordan insisted, and Klaus repeated it.

“Why, thank you, Jordan, that is so kind of you! Klaus, I almost forgot. Have you seen your closet yet? I took the liberty of ordering some clothes. It looked so bare.”

Klaus raised his eyebrows at Diego, who shrugged. “She insisted.”

“Lead the way,” Klaus told Mom, and then asked Diego as they headed out of the kitchen, “So, just how much of this is Mom’s doing?”

“Just the clothes and the cookies. What? She’s only been back two days. You don’t think I can order some furniture?”

“I didn’t say that. I guess I should be grateful you didn’t turn the living room into a training gym.”

“I saved that for my own apartment.” Diego pointed downwards with his thumb. “Two floors down. Gotta keep an eye on you, brother.”

Klaus supposed he could have been affronted at the lack of confidence. Instead, he was touched.

The master bedroom only had a king-sized bed and a simple birch bedside table, so far, but Klaus didn’t mind. Especially not when Mom opened the door to the walk-in closet.

It, too, was mostly empty, but only because it was huge. All his old clothes fit into one corner, and next to them were a dozen other outfits, in various colours and stages of sparkle, and several pairs of shoes.

They were impeccable outfits – exactly what someone might have chosen who had a photographic memory and the capacity to calculate, based on past clothing choices, what would be best suited to your tastes.

But Klaus’s gaze caught on a pair of simple skye-blue pumps. “Are those...?”

“They’re not mine,” Mom said. “Those were destroyed. They’re just the same model, in your current size.”

Slowly, Klaus bent down to pick up the shoes, running his fingertips against the velvety surface that he’d found so irresistible eighteen years ago. He took off his own boots and socks, and put the pumps on instead. They were probably meant to be worn with stockings, but even without any, they fit perfectly. He straightened back up, took a few trial steps, and then wrapped his arms around Mom.

Hugging her current chassis was awkward, all hard surface and angles, but that didn’t even matter. This was _mom_. Even restarted in a brand new body, everything important was still there.

“Thanks, mom,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “Now, what else have we got?”

The library, like the closet, was mostly empty, though there were some leather-bound classics that were bound to keep Ben happy for a while, now that he could manage physical books. There were also a couple of large armchairs that looked good for sitting not just the regular way, but sideways and on the armrests too.

The bathroom had a giant tub, a heated towel rack, and a double cabinet that Klaus figured he’d fill up soon enough.

Then they reached the playroom.

It was by far the most furnished of the rooms. The most noticeable item was the bunk bed, in the shape of a medieval castle, with a tent covering the lower bunk, two turrets, and a slide.

On the opposite wall, there was an aquarium with tropical fish, and a much smaller but similar castle at the bottom. It stood on a low bench, under which were three toy boxes: one blue, one red, and one green.

In between, there was a carpet with a map of a town on it, meant for playing with cars. A rocking horse stood to the side, as did a child-sized table with four chairs. On the table was a stack of papers and some finger paints.

Klaus had told Diego just last week that Jordan had discovered how to leave muddy handprints on the windows.

He’d never thought of Diego and parenting in the same sentence before. It didn’t fit well with the whole knife-throwing superhero gig. But now, he wondered if it had ever entered Diego’s mind.

This was _thoughtful_.

Klaus turned to Jordan, expecting them to be all bouncy and bubbly at the sight. But Jordan was quiet. Not awed quiet, sad quiet.

“Don’t you like it, honey?” he asked.

Jordan nodded. “It’s great. Thank you, Diego.”

“You’re welcome,” Diego said, frowning at the sight. “I, uh, got you a bunk bed like you asked.”

Jordan nodded again and climbed up the ladder, disappearing behind a turret.

All three brothers gave each other worried glances, though Mom, oblivious to what was going on, just said, “Well, I think I must do the washing-up. Baking is such messy work!” and rolled out of the room.

After some hesitation, Ben too climbed up to the top bunk. It probably wasn’t sturdy enough for grown men who happened to be alive, so Klaus and Diego remained below. Low murmurs revealed that Ben and Jordan were talking, though it was impossible to say about what.

“I thought they’d be happy,” Diego said helplessly.

Klaus beckoned him outside, noticing only now that the wall with the door had a bunch of detailed fairy tale paintings. More for Jordan to keep busy with even when they weren’t solid.

“I think they are,” he said in a low voice. “Or will be. But...” He tried to find a way to explain the shifts in Jordan’s mood. “They’re seven, and dead, and sometimes it hits even when it seems like it shouldn’t. It’s not as easy as good things, happy, bad things, sad.”

Diego bit his lip. “I guess... that makes sense.”

“You did great. Honestly. Thank you.”

That didn’t seem to ease Diego’s mind much. His gaze drifted back to the playroom and the top bunk.

“There’s another room. I thought Jordan would get a kick out of it. Should I...?”

“You could try.”

“Hey, Jordan,” Diego called softly. “We’ve got one room left. What do you think is in it?”

After a pause, Jordan called back, “Guest room?”

“Nah. I figure any guest of Klaus’s will be sleeping in his room.”

Klaus gave him the lightest of backhand slaps across the chest. “Bite me.”

“Ben’s room?” Jordan asked.

“The library’s Ben’s room. Guess again. Didn’t you miss anything in the living room?”

“TV! A TV room!”

“Kind of. Not quite. More of a movie theater.”

Jordan’s head popped up by the ladder, melancholy replaced with sheer shock. “An actual movie theater? With chairs and stuff?”

“With fifteen chairs and stuff. And properly isolated so the neighbors won’t mind,” he added as an aside to Klaus.

Jordan was already climbing down. “I’ve got to see this!”

They rushed out of the room, Ben following behind at a more reasonable pace, and Diego gave Klaus a relieved grin.

“Bingo at last.”

* * *

Jordan was still somewhat subdued the rest of the day, enough that Klaus considered taking them out on the roof and letting them jump off. He decided against it in the end; better not to set that kind of precedent.

Late at night, when he was about to go to sleep, Jordan sat down at the edge of the bed, and he made them solid enough for a good-night hug.

“You’re getting better at that,” Jordan said.

“Thank you.”

“Do you think you could do it without being in the room?”

“Well, we kind of did it back when you had to scream to wake Diego up, remember? So maybe.” His eyes narrowed. Jordan’s tone had been just a tad too casual. “Why? What is it you want to do without me being in the room?”

Jordan looked down, scratching their arm as if they were capable of having an itch. “I want to go see my mom.”

“Oh,” Klaus said. He should have expected that, and he contemplated the logistics of it. “Of course, we should go see her. And I could try bowing out of the room for a while, but... I don’t think I could keep it up for a whole conversation. But if there’s anything you want to talk to your mom about that you don’t want me to hear, you know you could just switch to Romani, right?”

“It’s not what I want to say, it’s what she might say!” Jordan’s eyes met Klaus’s, pleading desperately, though what for was still unclear. “She didn’t tell you last time, but she might tell you now, and then you’d know, and I don’t want you to know!”

“Know what?”

“What I am. Like, boy or girl.”

“Honey.” He stroked their cheek. “We’ve talked about this. You don’t have to be one or the other. You can be both, or neither, or different every day. And nobody else gets to decide for you.”

“But if mom tells you...”

“Moms don’t know everything.”

“So you won’t listen to her?”

“Not about that.”

Jordan thought about it, and then nodded, looking a little happier. “That’s okay, I guess. Will you call her?”

“It’s eleven thirty. I’ll call her tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Jordan stood up. “Good night. I’ll go haunt the restaurant by the lobby.”

That seemed like harmless fun, as long as they stayed in the restaurant and didn’t venture into people’s bedrooms, or practiced their poltergeist skills by breaking something, or got into trouble. The list of rules forming in Klaus’s mind got too long for him to keep straight in his current sleepy state, and in the end, he settled for, “Bring Ben.”

That ought to make other precautions unnecessary.

* * *

The next morning, as soon as Klaus opened his eyes, blinking in the sunlight, Jordan’s voice said in his ear: “Are you going to call my mom?”

Klaus groaned and rolled over on his back. “How long have you been sitting there?”

“Hours. Hours and hours.”

“About fifteen minutes,” said Ben, who was standing by the window. “We haunted the bakery before. Saw how croissants are made.”

“It takes forever,” Jordan explained. “They fold them and roll them a bunch of times. Will you call my mom now?”

“Yeah, yeah, give me a minute.” There was no snooze button on a child, so Klaus reluctantly got out of bed and tottered over to the kitchen, where he vaguely remembered seeing a phone the day before.

There was indeed a phone, next to the fridge. All this talk about croissants had made Klaus hungry, and so he opened the fridge on the off chance that there would be food inside.

He got lucky. There was an opened carton of milk, half a stick of butter, and some eggs, clearly leftovers from Mom’s baking.

Was it hard to fry an egg? He couldn’t recall ever trying. At least the milk was ready to be consumed, and he drank straight from the carton as he rummaged about for leftover cookies and/or a frying pan.

“Klaus!”

Klaus flinched, spilling some milk on the floor. “What? It’s not like anyone else is going to drink it!”

Jordan crossed their arms. “When are you going to call my mom?”

“Give me a minute, darling, some of us have bodies that need sustenance!”

In the end, he found both the cookies and the frying pan. The eggs turned out burned on the underside and runny on top, but he was hungry enough to eat them anyway. As he did so, Jordan watched impatiently, and Ben with a proud smile that half made Klaus want to flip him the bird, though he felt an odd sort of happiness too. Home-made breakfast that consisted of actual breakfast food. Who’d have thought it?

Belly full, Klaus got down to business. The call to Mrs. Demeter went easier than he’d expected. She readily agreed to meet in an hour, as if she’d just been waiting to hear from him. Maybe she had. All that time contemplating his life choices in rehab, he really should have spared a thought for the bereaved mother.

Next call was to the bank, who were very polite but regretted to inform him that the results of the drug test weren’t yet in.

Meaning that for the time being, while his lodgings were a lot nicer, the only actual cash he had was the contents of his wallet. He emptied it out and counted the coins and wrinkled dollars. It might be enough for a cab, but not if he wanted to eat anything else today. Though Mom was presumably still downstairs, and he was pretty sure she’d make him lunch if he asked her. Plus, he could always hit Diego up for a few more bucks, now that he was inches away from being able to pay at least some of it back.

Or he could just take the bus.

Jordan was freaking out about clothes. “I can’t wear this! It’s not Christmas!”

“It wasn’t Christmas before, either,” Klaus pointed out.

That only made Jordan’s scowl deepen. Their clothes flickered in and out of view, without ever settling on anything in particular, and they were getting more and more agitated.

“Jesus, kid, breathe, it’s not worth getting agitated over.”

“ _I don’t breathe!”_

Ben laughed. “Okay, calm down. Center yourself.” He nudged at Klaus to give Jordan an extra boost of power, which he did.

Jordan closed their eyes, concentrated hard for a moment, and the flickering stilled. They were now wearing dark dress trousers, a white frilly shirt, a red vest, and a pair of red boots that Klaus was pretty clear came from his own wardrobe. There was also a smudge of dark eyeliner such as he might have worn, though the hair was slicked back in Ben’s style.

Klaus smiled. The little ghost looked ready to audition for _Interview with the Vampire_.

“Nice suit,” he said.

“Thanks! It’s my cousin Kenny’s. Except his is black and white, but I like red. It fits the boots. I really like your boots. Can you wear them today? Wear something nice. And don’t leave the shirt open.”

“Your mom has already seen me,” Klaus pointed out as Jordan ushered him towards the closet, but he did feel a slight tug at the nerves. Last time, making a good impression hadn’t been on his radar the way it was now, and in the end, he went for the pin-striped suit he’d pinched off Dad that one time. Also a shower, because even if Jordan didn’t have a sense of smell, their mom definitely would.

Ben stayed in the same outfit as always and seemed much more relaxed about the whole thing. Enough that Klaus told him: “You do know I’m going to introduce you too, right?”

“Is that really necessary?” Ben asked.

“Very. We need to show that Jordan is being cared for by responsible adults. Your presence makes the whole thing much more convincing.”

Ben rolled his eyes, but didn’t protest.

Being out in public with Jordan usually meant keeping track of them as they ran this way and that, making comments on everything everyone was doing. This time, they followed quietly, back ramrod straight, down the elevator and onto the bus. Once there, Jordan’s attention was caught by a cocker spaniel two seats down, and they sat making cooing noises at that instead. Klaus found it a welcome change of pace – that good behavior made him nervous too.

All the other passengers on the bus were alive, which meant Klaus could try to focus on his thoughts. As they once again stepped inside Jordan’s old apartment block, he said, “Uh, listen, maybe we shouldn’t mention the whole rehab thing.”

“Well, _duh_ ,” said Jordan with a scathing look, and floated instantly up the stairs.

A few minutes later, Klaus was up there too and rang the doorbell.

Mrs. Demeter looked more composed than last time. Her hair was braided into a bun, she was wearing a black dress with a pattern of small white lilies, and though her face was solemn, her eyes were dry.

“Mr. Hargreeves. You have another message from Jordan?”

“Bit more than a message. Can I...?” He gestured towards the door and she stepped aside to let him in.

Once the door was closed, Klaus solidified Jordan, which caused Mrs. Demeter to gasp and drop to her knees.

“My baby! Oh, my baby is back!” She reached out with a trembling hand to touch Jordan, which worked as well as these things ever did – her hand sunk partway into the little ghost before stopping, like patting a pillow. In wonder, she moved her hand around, testing the clothes, and the hair. A small frown formed between her eyebrows. “What are you wearing?”

Jordan gave Klaus a quick, panicked glance, and then launched into what was presumably an explanation in Romani. Mrs. Demeter’s frown deepened as she responded in kind, and they kept on with a conversation that got increasingly heated.

“Mommy, please!” Jordan broke off. “Can we just... I’m happy to be here. Can’t you be?”

“Of course I am. So very, very happy, baby.”

Jordan gave their mom one of those tight, electric ghost hugs, and Mrs. Demeter smiled through the tears that were threatening to spill from her eyes. The hug lasted long enough that Klaus actually had to brace himself against the wall to keep Jordan solid throughout the whole thing.

Maybe Mrs. Demeter noticed his fatigue, because she stood up and said, “Come, sit down.”

“Thank you. Uh... actually, my brother’s here too. My dead brother. Do you mind if I...?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh. No, of course.”

To her credit, she dealt pretty well with seeing Ben manifest, but then, Ben had his kindest smile on and was as unthreatening a ghost as you could hope for.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” she said tentatively. “You are not the same man from before.”

“Right. No, that brother’s still alive. I’m Ben. Nice to meet you.”

“You too,” she said, and led them into the kitchen. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Jordan, I have those chips you like.”

“I don’t eat, Mom,” Jordan reminded her.

Mrs. Demeter stopped mid-action with a cupboard open. “Right. Of course.”

Silence fell over the room until Klaus broke it, saying, “If you’re having coffee, I’d love some.”

She nodded and put the kettle on, hands still a bit shaky.

“Thank you for having us on such short notice,” he continued, trying to bring up all his best small talk. That had never been his forte. “I hope we weren’t interrupting you going to work, or anything.”

“I don’t work on Sunday,” she said, giving him an odd look.

Right. Sunday. Normal people kept track of Sundays, because normal people had jobs to go to. Maybe even churches. Was Mrs. Demeter the church-going type? That dress could easily be a church dress.

Klaus looked around the room for anything to suggest a religion, and found an ornate crucifix on the wall. On the shelf under it was a vase of flowers and a photo. His eyes drifted from the photo to Jordan. Yup, it was a good likeness, though the photographer had managed to catch them more angelic than they ever had been in death.

Jordan saw the direction of his gaze and grimaced a little. “That’s an awful picture.”

“It’s a beautiful picture,” their mother protested. “There is one just like it at your grave.”

“Mom!”

“Have you not been to your grave? I have gone so often. It felt so easy to speak to you there. Was that wrong of me? Have I kept you here against your will? I didn’t perform any of the rites to keep your spirit away, I wanted to keep you with me. Maybe that was selfish. Is it my fault you’re not at rest?”

Jordan squirmed. “Mom, I’m _fine_. Where’s Milan and Emma? I want to see them.”

“In the bedroom. I thought if there was a séance, they shouldn’t see.”

“That’s silly. It’s just us.” Jordan bounced back off the bedroom door and asked Klaus, “A bit less solid?”

He’d been holding on so tight that it was a relief to let go a little, and a moment too late did the implications strike him. “Wait, maybe you shouldn’t...”

But Jordan was already slinking through the door, and a shriek was heard from the other side.

All three adults rushed forward, and Mrs. Demeter flung the door open.

The two children had clearly been watching cartoons from the bed. Now they were clinging to each other for dear life, the toddler mostly puzzled, the girl, who was a few years older, staring at her dead sibling in shock and fear.

“Sorry,” Jordan said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Are you a muló?” the girl asked.

“No! No, no... well, yes, maybe. But not a bad kind! A good kind, like Caspar, or Count Chocula.” They crouched down by the bed. “Hey. It’s just me. It’s just Jordan. Nothing scary, okay? Okay, Milan?”

The boy waved a chubby hand at Jordan, who wasn’t quite solid enough to take it, but who smiled at him and waved back.

“Gosh, Milan, you have _grown_! Such a big boy! Yeah, you’re a _big_ boy now!”

“You haven’t seen him?” Mrs. Demeter’s voice was flat.

Jordan fell quiet and looked up at their mother.

“All this time, you haven’t seen him? Where have you _been_ , Jordan?”

“See, that’s our fault,” Klaus said. “We were, uh, busy, and Jordan’s been helping out.”

“You went off with them?” Mrs. Demeter addressed Jordan without acknowledging that Klaus had spoken. “With strangers? I have mourned you, spoken to you, for three months, and you weren’t here?”

“You couldn’t see me,” Jordan said. “None of you could! Only them!”

“We can see you now.”

“It won’t last. It never lasts long. Look at Klaus, he’s already tired!”

“I’m okay for a little longer,” Klaus said. He hadn’t realized how attuned Jordan was to the state of his powers.

Ben had sat down at the edge of the bed, at some distance from the kids, clearly trying to be as unthreatening as possible. Now he said, “You’re right. We should have come earlier. We’ll try to make it up to you.”

Mrs. Demeter held up a hand. “This is between me and my...”

“Mom!” Jordan interrupted before their mother could finish the sentence. “Please, don’t tell them!”

“And what is that about?” she asked. “Why don’t you want them to know? What is happening to you?”

“I’m just me!” Jordan was getting blurry. Winnie-the-Pooh seemed imminent, and that would be unfortunate around the little ones. Klaus reached out a hand and concentrated, to keep their clothes intact. “I’m different now, that’s all.”

“It would have been easier if you’d never come at all.”

Crestfallen, Jordan sat back on the bed. Klaus, at a loss for words, turned to Ben, who only shrugged, equally helpless.

All Klaus wanted to do was to take the little ghost and leave this place and never come back, but that didn’t seem fair on anyone. You couldn’t expect a person to deal well with ghosts on the first try. He was almost thirty and still didn’t deal well with them on the whole.

Maybe he ought to suggest that Mrs. Demeter and the kids moved in with them. There was definitely more room in their apartment compared to this one, and it would give Jordan a chance to reconnect with their family on a regular basis.

At the same time, the way things were going, maybe that would do more harm than good. Even suggesting it might not be a good idea, make Jordan feel obligated even if it wasn’t what they wanted.

If Jordan made any suggestion in that direction, he’d say yes. That seemed like the best choice.

But Jordan didn’t say anything at all. Instead, the little girl, Emma, did.

“Can we play with your toys?” she asked.

Jordan looked up at their mom. “My toys are still here?”

“All your things are still here,” Mrs. Demeter said, her voice choked. “In boxes, under the bed. I couldn’t bear to get rid of them.”

“Then yes,” Jordan told their sister. “You can play with my toys. Klaus, will you help?”

Klaus and Emma pulled out two cardboard boxes and blew off the dust before opening them. One was full of clothes, the other held the promised toys. Emma right away started playing with a Lego set that she was probably too young for.

Her little brother definitely was. He wiggled off the bed in search for toys, so Klaus handed him a crocodile hand puppet that he couldn’t very well get stuck in his throat.

Jordan sat down on the floor too, and looked up at their mom. “Can I keep my teddy bear and Superman?”

“Of course. They’re yours.”

Klaus very carefully took out a Superman action figure with the S missing, and a much-loved teddy bear with patches of curly fur.

“You can have the rest,” Jordan told their siblings. “All of it, the clothes too. Don’t worry, I won’t haunt you for it.”

“You can haunt us a little bit,” Emma said. “I won’t mind.”

Jordan smiled, and held out a hand towards Klaus, who took it and sent another burst of power through. The kid was right, doing it for this long really did take a toll.

More solid once again, Jordan kissed their brother and sister, and then walked up to their mom. Mrs. Demeter bent down, and Jordan kissed her on the cheek.

“I’ll come back to visit,” they promised.

“When?” Mrs. Demeter asked softly. “In another three months?”

“Maybe sooner. I could come for my birthday.”

“I can’t even bake you a cake.”

Jordan didn’t reply, just watched their siblings playing for a little while and then abruptly said, “Bye, mom.”

They glided out the door, completely intangible and probably invisible by now, and Ben followed. Klaus rose too, but it didn’t feel right to leave like this, and return to that lavish skyscraper with its roofside swimming pool and uniformed doorman.

“Wait,” he said. “Listen, I’ve recently come into some money, and I’m thinking, we all need money, right, so maybe you could have some too?”

Mrs. Demeter’s mouth tightened. “I don’t need charity.”

“Oh, no, no, not like charity. Just, you know, for the kids, and, and to thank you, I guess, for raising Jordan into such a great little kid.” He couldn’t very well offer a recurring amount – as much as he wanted to stay off the drugs, there was no guarantee. “How about 40,000, to start with?”

The sum shut down Mrs. Demeter’s protests. “40,000 dollars?”

“Sure.” Diego would just have to wait a little long to get his money back. “What do you say?”

Mrs. Demeter’s gaze drifted over him. Okay, so he didn’t have the clothes of someone who could give away 40,000 dollars on a whim. That would change soon enough. Then her eyes turned to her children.

“If you’re serious,” she said slowly, “then yes. Thank you.”

“Great. I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”

The ghosts were already out of the building, and Klaus had to run to catch up with them. Ben was carrying Jordan, whose face was buried in his neck, clothes once again back to the ones they’d died in.

“Are you okay, kid?” Klaus asked.

At first, Jordan didn’t respond, but after a while, they mumbled, “I felt so _dead_.”

Ben tsked. “I know. It’s like that sometimes.”

“I don’t feel dead with you.”

He smiled. “I don’t feel dead with you either.”

The living perspective didn’t seem needed, so Klaus merely reached out and patted Jordan’s hair with the little strength he had left.

They reached the bus stop and sat in silence for a while, before Jordan started speaking again, in a burst of anger:

“I’m glad that stupid picture is on my grave! I hate that picture. I’m glad that Jordan is dead!”

“Good for you, kid,” Klaus said. “Rise like a phoenix from the ashes.”

“What’s a phoenix?”

“A bird that’s, uh, born in a fire.”

“For real?”

“No. In stories.”

Jordan nodded slowly. “Like a phoenix,” they said, trying it on for size.

“Hey,” Ben said, bouncing Jordan a little in his arms. “I used to have a statue. That was _weird_.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. It’s gone now. Thank God.”

“You never told me you didn’t like it,” Klaus said.

“Well, I didn’t. It’s a strange feeling, being commemorated.”

Jordan frowned. “What’s commem...?”

“Commemorated. It means remembered with honor, like a saint or something.”

“Right!” Jordan said. “You just want to be a person.”

“Exactly.”

Klaus didn’t suppose Ben wanted to hear it, but there _was_ something rather beatific about him at that moment, so peaceful, with the child in his arms. Even in life, he hadn’t looked so happy. Maybe especially in life.

It was strange to think about, that Ben had been closer to Jordan’s age than to Klaus’s when he died. Just a kid himself, never a chance to break free and build his own life, his own family.

The bus arrived. Klaus drew a deep breath.

“Well. Back to the abodes of the rich and powerful. Let’s see if we can shake up the neighborhood.”

* * *

Klaus waited until Jordan was seated in the movie theater, fully immersed in _Alice in Wonderland_ , before he talked to Ben – in the kitchen at the opposite end of the apartment, to make sure.

“Do you think we should have asked Mrs. Demeter and the kids to stay with us?”

Ben’s eyebrows shot up. “I can’t see that going well.”

“Me neither,” Klaus admitted. “Even if she _didn’t_ find out the ex-junkie part, which, let’s face it, she would. But I feel so guilty. We essentially stole her kid.”

“No. Her kid died in a car crash. We had nothing to do with that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do, and you’re wrong. Jordan is _dead_. Their body is rotting away as we speak, in a grave with a too-saccharine picture.”

“Okay, you don’t have to get so morbid.”

“Don’t I?” Ben’s face was stern, eyes flaming in a way they hadn’t been since Klaus got off the drugs. “Our family is such a weird-ass mess, it doesn’t even register anymore. You’re worried about the ex-junkie thing? How about the robot downstairs? Or the knife-throwing vigilante? How about the ape man, or the assassin in the body of a teenager, or the woman who almost ended the world? You want to bring that nice, normal family into ours? And for what? Jordan will still be dead, Jordan is _always_ going to be dead, and that woman is always going to make them feel it.”

“She’s their mother,” Klaus protested, a lump in his throat. “Sure, it’s messed up, but they love each other.”

“And we’ll visit, whenever Jordan needs it. Even though it’ll most likely end up just like today. Because the truth is, there are so many milestones Jordan is never going to meet, so many things they’ll never experience, and that’s hard enough without having to deal with the pressure of living up to being alive.”

“You’re doing okay.”

“God, you have no idea!” Ben sat down heavily and shook his head. “Even you.”

“Ben...”

“I’m doing okay because I’ve got you. Because you know the deal with ghosts, I can be as full-on dead as I’m always going to be, and still feel like a person. Talking to you, watching you do stuff, it’s kept me grounded, almost human. But only almost. Ghosts aren’t people. We like to think that we’re people, but we don’t eat, we don’t sleep, if you prick us, we don’t bleed, if you poison us, we don’t get any deader.”

Klaus stopped even trying to fight the tears. This was too much like when they were kids, after missions when Ben would wake up in the middle of the night and have to spew out his feelings, overwhelmed with the burden of what his power did to him.

Even though Klaus was too exhausted already, he reached out, needing to touch his brother – but Ben snatched back his hand.

“Don’t.”

“I want to... help. If I can.”

“You are helping. That’s just it, even at your worst, even when you were doing everything to destroy yourself and I hated you for it, you were still helping. I’ve watched you sick and starving and degrading yourself in every way possible, I’ve watched you flatline in an ambulance, and all the time, all I could think was, dear God, let him live, and if not, let him take me with him, because if not, then there’s _nothing_ left. Without you, I would have screamed into the void until I tore myself to shreds. I’ve seen it happen, over and over again. You’re not wrong to be afraid of ghosts, Klaus. There are those of us who’d eat you alive, if we could, to sate that hunger just a little bit.”

“It’s not always like that,” Klaus whispered, wiping at his eyes.

“No. There are some who accomplish what they set out to do, or accept the fact that they never will, and eventually they leave. I hope that’s still in the cards for us, someday. You may need to help us along.”

“No!”

“Klaus.”

There was no use protesting, was there? The alternative was unthinkable. Those vengeful, shrieking remnants that still haunted his nightmares – one of them could have been Ben, or Jordan. Could still be.

“But you’re good with Jordan,” he pleaded. “Better than I am. You understand them in a way I never will. Can’t that be enough? Can’t you be... happy?”

“I don’t know.” Ben’s voice had gone quiet now. Tired. “Jordan is the best thing that’s happened to me since I died. Maybe ever. I suppose I am happy. Whether that can be enough, in the long run, if there can be a happy ghost... I’ve never seen one, but then, I’ve never looked. That’s the thing. I love Jordan, but if you hadn’t been there, I would have walked right past them, never even thought about it. I’ve wondered why, ever since. Ghosts can talk to ghosts, touch ghosts, we ought to be able to build communities, just like the living do, but we don’t. It’s too easy to get used to the idea that nothing you do matters. You lose track of time, of the world, and then you’re stuck in yourself, your own pain and fear and desires, or even just mindless routine.”

That was far too easy to imagine. “Do you know what it sounds like?”

Ben thought about it, and then smiled, sadly. “Like being on drugs?”

“A bit, yeah. You saved me too, you know.”

“I know. Asshole.”

“Don’t you think Jordan’s mom could keep them grounded too?”

“Maybe someday. Not now. It’s a hell of a balance. Maybe thirty years from now, they’ll be where you are now.”

“What, newly sober?”

“I don’t envy you your power,” Ben said with a sad smile. “In a way, it’s more of a burden than mine.”

Klaus reached out and booped his nose lightly. “I never thought I’d say this, but if I can help you, it’s worth it.”


	9. Coda

A good night’s sleep for Klaus meant dreamless. Dreams were nearly always nightmares, filled with ghosts or gunfire or his father’s voice. The good ones were few and far between, and he could hardly ever remember them afterwards.

But one early morning, he half-woke to the muffled sounds of Ben and Jordan singing and dancing in the livingroom. They were trying to keep it down for his benefit, but they weren’t very good at it.

When he stretched, the softness of his bed reached as far as his limbs would go. The fridge was stocked, as was his brand-new bank account, and there was nothing he had to do that day except brush up on second-grade science.

Klaus smiled and went back to sleep, and in that state, he dreamed.

In his dream, he was still in the comfort of his bed, but Dave was with him, trailing kisses along his body, whispering sweet nothings in his ear. They laughed, and talked, and teased each other, and fucked loud enough to raise the ceiling. There was nothing to worry about anymore, no war raging, no one who could discover them and give them any grief. They were free, and blissfully alive, and exploring every inch of each other’s bodies, building up to the orgasm.

When it came, Klaus called out Dave’s name so loud that he woke once again, hand around his dick, heart racing.

Dave was sitting at the foot of the bed.

“Good morning,” he said softly.

“Dave. I’ve missed you so much.”

“I gathered that.” A smile tugged at Dave’s lips. “Pretty unmissable call. You lit up the whole sky like a beacon.”

“Wait.” Klaus’s faculties were starting to return to him. He sat up and reached for Dave, his hand first meeting nothing and then, after some concentration, with the characteristic electric tingle that meant ghost. “You’re here. You’re actually here. I summoned you?”

“Bit of an unconventional way of doing it, but yes.”

“God.” Maybe Klaus ought to be worried, or guilty, after what Ben had told him about the afterlife, but all he felt was an immense relief, and he pulled Dave into a hug. “I can’t believe it. You’re finally here! What took you so long?”

“What took _me_ so long?” Dave pulled back and glared at Klaus in mock outrage. “Well, let’s see, I woke up _dead_ and found that you’d pretty much disappeared off the face of the Earth. I searched for you all over ‘Nam and then somehow ended up in a donut shop stateside because you happened to mention that you loved going there as a kid. Then I spend forever haunting that place before you finally show up, and when you do you’re yea tall and terrified of me. By the time you’ve grown up enough to even slightly resemble the man I fell in love with, you’re so doped up you can’t hear a word I say. At which point it’s been _forty years_! So yeah, I gave up. Can you blame me?”

“No. I’m sorry. I should have told you about the time travel thing.”

“Yeah, you should.”

“I’ve tried calling you, though. So many times.”

Dave shrugged. “I only heard this one.”

That made sense – Klaus had become a lot stronger lately. Making use of some of that strength, he pulled Dave close again and kissed him.

Kissing a ghost was definitely a new experience, but the buzzing sensation lit his body aflame just as well as flesh and blood could. He deepened the kiss, and his hands settled around Dave’s ass.

“Ew,” said a distinct voice by the door. “Who’s that?”

Klaus looked up and met Jordan’s critical glare.

“Morning, Jordan. This is Dave. Dave, this is Jordan. Who should maybe knock next time.”

“I can’t knock when you haven’t been boosting me.”

Ben, too, popped inside. “Jordan, don’t wake... oh, hi.”

“Hey,” Dave said, on the brink of laughter.

That greeting was far too casual. Klaus looked from one to the other. “Wait. You know each other?”

“We’ve met.”

“You could have said!” Klaus accused Ben, who shrugged.

“I did. I specifically told you, ‘One of the ghosts claims he’s your future boyfriend.’ You said... things I won’t repeat in front of Jordan. By the time you started talking about Dave, he’d been gone for years. Didn’t seem to be any use in bringing it up then.”

“Oh.” He had to admit that made too much sense. This whole time-travelling haunting situation was a mess and a half.

Jordan was still glaring. “Are you Klaus’s boyfriend?”

“I used to be,” Dave said, giving Klaus a cautious glance.

“Yes,” Klaus said firmly. “He’s my boyfriend. If you still want to be, that is?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Even if it means staying down here for a while?”

Dave ran his finger down Klaus’s cheek. “What afterlife could be better than this smile?”

That caused Klaus’s smile to widen even further, and his stomach to melt into a puddle of goo.

“What room are you staying in?” Jordan demanded to know.

“I, uh, don’t know?”

“I think Jordan is a little territorial about their playroom,” Klaus explained.

“Oh. Well, don’t worry, Jordan. I won’t take your playroom.” Dave’s eyes were even more beautiful than Klaus remembered, and looked deeply into his. “Maybe I could stay in here?”

“I’d love that.”

“Are they going to be like this all the time now?” Jordan asked Ben, who laughed.

“No. Just give them a moment to reconnect, and I bet they’ll be fine.”

“Can we jump off the roof while we wait?”

“Hmm, how about we discuss that where Klaus can’t hear?”

Which meant they probably would end up jumping off the roof. Well, fair was fair, Klaus supposed – he didn’t want to watch that, and Jordan didn’t want to watch the lovey dovey part.

“Bye, Dave,” Ben said and vanished into the livingroom, pulling Jordan along.

“Bye, Ben, bye Jordan,” Dave said. “It was nice meeting you.”

Jordan paused, already halfway through the door, and gave it some thought before replying, “Nice meeting you too, I guess. Klaus looks really happy.”

And with that, they were out too. Klaus laughed softly. His arms once again settled around Dave.

“Wow. I think you just got the official stamp of approval.”

“I’m honored.”

“So, I come with a family now.”

“I noticed.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not in the slightest. Do you mind making me a part of it?”

Klaus closed his eyes and leaned in for another kiss. “You were the only thing missing.”


End file.
